Shadow Zone brings more invizimals into the fray, but it still suffers the same technical problems as its predecessor.
Gameplay 7- First, the story. The first game was all about following an asian scientist in the pursuit of invisible animals that only the PSP could see. For the most part the narrative was pretty bland and didnt do much to immerse you in it and the second game is no exception. Shadow Zone follows pretty by-the-book as you would expect a sequel story to. Along with Kenichi, more people have joined his research team as they travel the world in search of new monsters.
For what the game does right in the augmented reality area, it also falters. The game can easily be tricked to trigger monsters' appearance with Paint as a particular color seems to be all that is needed. Also there is a preferred angle for view of the trap card, otherwise the monster placement and overlaid battlefield freaks out and warps orientation or even says 'please look at the trap card'
Some of the mini-games can further be exploited in the ones that require side to side movement. You can simply rotate the trap card with your hand. Of note are particular capture sequences that require sound input; these can be frustrating on the mere fact the game doesnt always recognize your speech, whistle, or singing.
These minor complaints aside, Invizimals is pretty fun when it does work, and being one of the few augmented reality games around, it is one of the better ones. Shadow Zone improves on the original by adding more types of capture minigames so there is less redundancy.
Graphics 8- The monsters themselves look good and are nicely detailed. They have fluid animations, both physical and attack. The story is done almost entirely by cutscenes involving the actors so it is like little snips of a movie sprinkled in between the many battles.
Sound 7- Not much in terms of sound. There are only a handful of music tracks and monster sounds are repetitious. For some reason you have to really crank up the volume with invizimals to easily hear the spoken dialogue.
Fun Factor 8- Invizimals feels like a pokemon game aimed at an older crowd and aside from the occasional aforementioned technical glitches performs well and is a lot of fun; moreso now that two people can be involved in captures.
Replay Value 7- Despite all the perks, the monsters only level so much- around level 12- so unless you take a lot of time to raise up several of them most of the game can be cleared with just one, and there is little incentive to do much after the story is finished.
Final Score 37/50