The legends go that long ago — sometime during the 1990s — the great company Pretendo hired a small indie-developer to make the world’s next monster-collecting sensation, and then immediately buried the results of his efforts somewhere in the Nevada Desert. Although that’s just a mocked-up story put forward by RogueMON when you first boot the game up, I certainly wouldn’t have blamed anyone at Nintendo if they actually chose to bury something like this. RogueMON (out now, free) has an App Store page which says you’ll need to be at least 17 years old in order to download this free rogue-like Pokémon-inspired parody, and there’s certainly a very good reasons for that notice!
Your first order of business will be to select which RogueMON will represent you in battle, with your options including “gems” such as: Hawt Cawk (a fire-chicken), Buck Suck Duck (a parody of Scrooge McDuck), and the Pickle Pimp (a pimp-suited Pickle). At this point — unless those names went completely over you head — it’s clear what we have here is a game combining the creature-collecting of Pokémon, with the unsubtle variant of vulgar-humor found in Garbage Pail Kids. If you should have even the slightest concerns at this point that RogueMON might actually not be for you, then please stop reading right now as there’s a 99.9% chance your gut-hunch is absolutely spot-on.
The gameplay itself is basically competent, with players going through the usual motions of selecting monsters — ideally of the right element (and no, I won’t be listing RogueMON’s offered elements) — and then engaging in turn-based menu-driven battles. Of particular note here is that virtually any attack can be blocked if the player taps their screen just before it strikes (similar to Super Mario RPG), yet they must also tap the screen just before their own attack hits or else their opponent will fully-dodge as well. The other major new wrinkle here is that — keeping in line with the game’s Roguelike inspirational sources — all death here are usually permanent, and defeat immediately leads to a cut-scene of that particular RogueMON being literally flushed down the toilet.
Between these battles you’ll walk down a randomly generated pathway — never knowing what sort of opponents you’ll experience next — and occasionally receive offers to take an alternative-pathway, or buy from shops carrying a randomly-determined selection. Whereas you’d generally know what to expect next in a normal Pokémon game — and thus would carefully craft your team accordingly — here there’s little to inform you what dangers you might be facing next, and thus having a well-balanced team is beneficial. Ergo RogueMON whom are nearly dead can be captured by tossing-out a straight-up copyright-infringing Ghostbusters trap, whose odd of success can then be further increased by rapidly tapping the screen (which was actually something I really liked).
After capturing a RogueMON — which allows you to afterwards use them as your starter during a new game-session — you may either add them to your current team, or eat them for triple experience-points. If the idea of this seems horrifying, then you probably haven’t yet caught on to just how edgy — in the most juvenile way possible — this game is desperately striving to be at all times. This game features a highway-patrol outfitted alien named Prob. Orificer (he features a very phallic-looking attack), and even a RogueMON named Dumpin’ Donut (whom attacks enemies via waterfall-styled super-defecation).
To put this in simpler terms, playing RogueMON in public is virtually ensured to either get yourself expelled from school — fired from your job — or otherwise banned from your favorite restaurant. I know that some people — disappointed with Pokemon GO’s lackluster battle-system — have been looking for a more faithful free-alternative, but this is likely not the portable Poké-clone you’ve been seeking. After all, pretty much the only guaranteed safe-place to engage in RogueMON’s extremely low-brow visual-humor is behind a locked-door (presumably somewhere within the safety of your own home).
At this point I’ll stop needlessly beating-around-the-bush, and just straight up admit that I’m actively recommending most of you pass this game up by due to its copious amounts of poor-taste. RogueMON is the sort of game where you need to be more than seventeen years old to legally download, yet also the sort of game where you’ll likely need to be roughly thirteen to find yourself actually amused. I’m actually not opposed to the occasional bout of wrong-humor — and I love shows like Rick and Morty, Robot Chicken, and Venture Bros — but this here is lacking the necessary subtlety to make things work.
That said — should you have a cast-iron stomach for this sort of stuff, or perhaps actively seek such humor — then I guess you can’t go wrong here either (especially since there’s no IAPs, or ads, to be found what-so-ever), just remember to not play RogueMON in public.
Verdict
Burger Circus’s RogueMON is a fully-free — with no ads, or even IAPs, present — 100%-randomized perma-death featuring rogue-like game inspired by Nintendo’s Pokémon series, that furthermore contains a tap-timing based battle-system a la Super Mario RPG. Seeing as how the featured mechanics work decently well, I’d likely be raving for RogueMON if the developers had seen fit to stop their tribute-driven efforts somewhere along there. Unfortunately these mechanics are coupled with a cavalcade of juvenile-humor — without any subtlety — nearly taken straight from a deck of Garbage Pail Kids, and playing this game anywhere in public becomes a massively unadvisable prospect.