If you’re a big games company who have a franchise or series that is making a ton of cash every single time it is released, you’re not going to be stupid and stop milking it, are you? Given the financial climate at the moment, keeping the green rolling into your bank account is a pretty sensible plan of action right now, hence we arrive neatly at the giant supermassive money monster that is Nintendo’s Pokemon series.

Platinum, the latest title off the production line at Game Freak, continues a familiar life-cycle that sees two new flavours of Pokemon released every so often, with a compiled ‘director’s cut’ effort following on the heels about a year later with a couple of new monsters and perhaps some additional features sprinkled on top. It was done with Yellow back in the day; it was also done with Emerald a few years ago and here we are once again staring at a game that, to some, going to seem really, really familiar to something we’ve already played.

Hence, there are two standpoints on which you can look at Platinum. First off, if you are new to the series then I can heartily recommend this as an excellent place to start, for all the same reasons that I mentioned in my Diamond and Pearl review a couple of years back. You begin the adventure as a young scamp who is awarded his very first Pokemon because he and a friend were about to go wandering about in long grass (yes, seriously), and from there you uncover all sorts of strange goings on as you ascend through the Pokemon ranks – strange goings on that you’ll end up having a big hand in solving. I believe the term for such would be ‘mild peril’.

Throughout the adventure you’ll be adhering to the old ‘gotta catch ‘em all’ motto that the series rather tirelessly reminds you of at every opportunity, with your character meeting, turn-based battling and (hopefully) catching all sorts of wild monsters as he ventures from place to place. Once caught, each Pokemon can be added to a battle line up of six from which you can choose out in the field, and each of them can be levelled to gain new skills and become generally tougher.

Slowly adding to your collection as you go does actually get quite moreish, with the Pokemon falling into a few groups depending on their elemental properties. You may, for example, have a Chimchar (some kind of monkey with first-degree burns on its tail) and be kicking some arse during the early stages due to being able to set enemies on fire, but come up against a water Pokemon of equivalent level and you’re suddenly up the creek with a broken paddle and a leaking canoe. In doing this, the game gives you a good reason to collect everything you can and set up a pretty bullet proof group of strong Pokemon so you can swap in and out depending on situation.

This is all huzzah and hurrah indeed, and the way the game pieces together the adventure looped through the midst of all this battling and collecting is pretty solid too. You start off with a few Pokemon and not many abilities, but by travelling to different cities you can face off against gym leaders in order to gain special powers that your Pokemon can use out in the field, each of which will allow you to venture down new paths and explore the game world even further. Hardly (Team) rocket science, but nonetheless a pretty no-fuss, robust manner of having the game unfold in front of you.

This is all fine if, as said, you are new to the series or have not played either Pearl or Diamond. Problem is, I am amongst the few million worldwide who have, and the result is that Platinum feels really, really familiar. Granted, the game has added a few new tangents for the story, has tweaked the interface a little and added around sixty Pokemon to the already well-stocked list to capture, but the overriding feeling you get from zipping through the thing is that you’re playing a slightly re-skinned version of a game that you’ve already chucked a good forty plus hours at.

It’d be easy enough to suggest that the true Pokemon diehard won’t mind as much and perhaps that’s true, but for the rest of us it’s just not going to be as fun second time around. One could point to the new online options that cater for multiplayer mini games and send notices to a user’s Wii message board once a Pokemon trade has been completed amoingst other things and, yeah, they are nice additions, as is the Distortion World dungeon that occurs later in the game and sees the game go all funky and odd with Escher-type perspective trickery, but do they really warrant the £30 price tag alone? Probably not, no.

If you like skipping to the end of these reviews to read the final summary, then you probably should have taken the preceding seven paragraphs into account and not been so hasty. As I am in a good mood, though, I’ll sum up things nicely enough for you: if you are new to the series or just really, really like Pokemon and can cope with playing a pimped version of Pearl/Diamond over again, then you’ll probably want to pick this up. It doesn’t do anything wrong as a standalone game, with bright and breezy graphics, tons of Pokemon to catch and a pretty decent online offering. For those who played Pearl/Diamond and thought ‘yeah, that was pretty enjoyable’ but wouldn’t want to play the same thing again with a few additions and tweaks, then you may want to wait this one out and get the next fully different (if such a thing is possible) version in a couple of years’ time. Capiche?