Free-to-play Pokémon Shuffle headed to iPhone, Android
3DS game making the leap to phones.
Free-to-play 3DS puzzler Pokémon Shuffle is headed to iPhone and Android mobiles.
The Pokémon Company has published a brief trailer showing off the game's new phone-based version. Once again, the main game will be a free download funded by in-app purchases.
Pokémon Shuffle has been a huge success on 3DS. It launched back in February and by April had already been downloaded more than 3 million times.
A thinly-veiled take on the popular Puzzle and Dragons mobile app, Shuffle lets you play five games for free during each play session.
The ability to play for free then recharges over time, or you can pay to buy more play tokens (hearts). You can also buy lumps of in-game gold to use on items.
We previously investigated how long you should expect to play without paying up. Since then, the game has at least separated out hearts that recharge naturally over time (up to a limit of five) from hearts you buy.
But Eurogamer's Christian Donlan wasn't convinced:
"Shuffle is a muddle, then," he wrote in our Pokémon Shuffle review, "an acceptable distraction undermined by the grasping philosophy behind its business model as much as the actual amount of money it could cost you."
Nintendo is due to start releasing its own mobile games from later this year. A number of apps featuring Pokémon have already launched for mobile platforms, published by The Pokémon Company.
