Format Nintendo DS • Price £29.99

Publisher Nintendo • Game type Arcade

Release 5 May 2006 • Info Link up your Pokémon for points!

Fancy a bit of puzzling Pokémon action on your Nintendo DS? Well there’s a great game in town that will drive you crazy with frantic Poké action – Pokémon Link…

Forget about catching ’em all – now you’ve got to slide ’em all in the great  Nintendo DS Pokémon game Pokémon Link from good old uncle Nintendo. It’s kind of like Tetris or Mean Bean Machine. You know, one of those devilishly tricky puzzle games that seems incredibly simple to start with, but soon draws you in and gets you hooked! You soon won’t be able to put this baby down!

The idea is to line up four of the same Pokémon icons in a row either horizontally or vertically using the touch screen and stylus. You can move icons up, down, left and right if space allows, and all the time new icons are falling from the top screen on your DS, so you can see what’s about to hit. Easy enough eh? The fun starts when you’ve made a group of four, they will pop creating a Link Chance. All the icons above now fall down in to the spaces left. If these icons form more links, great – a chain reaction occurs. Once all the four links have been popped, three icon links go off, then two icon links until the chain reaction stops. All the Pokémon popped go in to a Link List to add towards your high score.

With 380 Pokémon characters to collect it’s going to take a while to fill up your Link List, and in a clever twist Nintendo don’t allow you to find them all in the one-player game. You can link up your Nintendo DS via Wi-Fi with other DS gamers to play multiplayer games – they don’t even need a copy of the game to do this! By playing either against another gamer in Link Battle  mode, or together in Pair Link co-op mode, you get to discover lots of new Pokémon icons.

Of course you can always have yourself a quick game of Pokémon Link, or you can settle down and take on the adventure mode, complete with its own unique story. So who is that girl on the cover of this issue? It’s Lucy Fleetfoot, a secret agent of the Secret Operations League who has been hired by Professor P to rescue stolen Pokémon from the evil Phobos Battalion. She’s helped in her quest by the ever-happy Aipom, and the electrifying Manectric. Knowing the power of Pokémon, Phobos tasked themselves with stealing as many Pokéballs as they could get their hands on, and took them to their secret bases using Phobos Mobile machines – the sneaky so-and-sos! So how can Lucy get them back? By using a new gadget called the Trozei Beamer that’s how! By using this she can scan all the Pokéballs she finds and transfer any Pokémon inside to safety. In order to beam out the Pokémon, and accurate lock is needed which means the Pokémon need to be lined up in straight lines of four monsters!

The great thing about Nintendo games are all the little extras they pack in to the cartridge for you to find, and this new Pokémon game is no exception. Die-hard Pokémon Link fans have the option of using the Espionage mode of the game. This is very similar to a Bark mode seen in Nintendogs on the DS if you’ve played that one. Players create themselves an Agent Card featuring their nickname and a message. Then when they’re next passing another Nintendo DS player who also has Pokémon Link in Espionage mode, the Agent Card will be traded with theirs. By doing this, the chance of finding rare Pokémon is increased, so get trading!

Pokémon Link is another ingenious addition to the Pokémon game library. The game makes great use of the DS’s unique touch screen capabilities and there is no much packed into the cartridge, you’ll be making links ’til the cows come home! Get a copy and become a Secret Operations League agent today!

I had to wait ages to get my hands on Pokémon Link, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed! When Nintendo turn Pokémon into puzzle games you know it’s always going to be a quality game with lots of action, lots of head scratching moments and bags of fun. Link is fast and furious, and the extra story modes mean you’ll want to play this game over and over again!