Publisher Activision hopes to be part of the new playground sensation Bakugan with its upcoming video game tie-in. Entitled Bakugan: Battle Brawlers, the game is based both on the Spin Master-developed card game and Nelvana Enterprises' cartoon series, and features a story mode with a plot devised by the TV show's writers.
And Activision producer Donna Johnston is optimistic that Bakugan can become a major games franchise for the publisher and developer Now Productions.
"The strategic card game has been out six months in the UK, and it was the number one new product in Q4 last year," she said.
"There are more than 55 million Bakugan users out there worldwide, which is incredible.
Activision is pleased to announce today the fall release of Bakugan Battle Brawlers: Defenders of the Core for the DS, Wii, PSP, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.
Building a team of creatures and ability cards, you take on genero-anime opponents in battles that are a mix of touchscreen minigames, stylus-swiping ball-steering and tiresome animations. The story behind all this may hold some appeal for Bakugan fans but the repetitive scraps will bore most gamers, not least because you don't do much – aside from a few screen taps, things seem to happen around you, making the whole thing incredibly boring. For non-Bakugan followers this is, quite literally, balls.
Crispy Gamerr writes: "0:00 The back of the box promises that "This is Bakugan like never before." That's highly accurate for me, since I'd never heard of Bakugan before receiving this game in the mail. But I like to keep up with the "youth culture" with its "Internet" and its "sexting" and its "industrials" and so forth, so I figured I'd see what this was all about."
