It’s what fans have been waiting for: an actual, honest-to-Cronenberg game in the Rick And Morty universe! Licensed game adaptations of TV shows are usually just absolute bottom-of-the-barrel drek, so my hopes weren’t high. But Adult Swim Games has well exceeded them with this hilarious little title that is a straight-up copy of Pokemon.
Rick And Morty Gaming Finally Goes Legit
You can grab it for free through Google Play here, with the game launching a day earlier than was originally announced. Unlike the other Rick And Morty joke apps that have been released in that past (like that game about keeping Jerry occupied by popping balloons…) this is an actual full-length game that you can sink a significant amount of time into while waiting for Season 3 to land.
Opening with just another day in the garage as Rick goes about his inventing, a casual request for a screwdriver is made. Fans of the show know how terribly wrong everything will go from there.
Rick is typically callous towards Morty’s well being
Soon the grandpa/grandson team are lured into another dimension by a Mysterious Rick, but getting back home is going to be a bit of a challenge. Turns out you can’t get your portal gun back until you impress the Council Of Ricks by collecting 40 badges, which requires collecting, combining, and battling an even more ludicrous array of Mortys!
The entire game is a riff on Pokemon, but it works incredibly well because the premise amazingly fits the show, and there are a ton of little joke nods to the source material. Rather than grass or fire type… you’ve got rock, paper, and scissor type Mortys. Really taking you back to another era are the on-screen buttons, making Pocket Mortys look and feel like a Gameboy title.
Welcome to the Gameboy dimension, Morty
Endless Morty Combat Mayhem
In typical Rick And Morty fashion, the game makes it clear all this battling is going to happen whether Morty is down with fighting alternate versions of himself to the death or not.
They don’t sugarcoat it either – while there aren’t any really rapey pirates (at least not as far as I’ve played yet), the game goes out of the way to point out the absurd, simple truth Pokemon glosses over: you are beating living creatures until they submit to you, and then forcing to them to battle in what is essentially an organized dog fighting ring. Rick sees no moral quandary in this setup.
In the course of your dimensional travels to collect ’em all, you’ll come across feral Mortys, old Mortys, double-headed Mortys, crazy cat person Mortys, reverse mermaid Mortys, and more. Just give them a few whacks, and then insert a control chip to make them fight for you.
Yep, Morty gets Cronenberged up
The in-universe references are pretty spot-on, with Mr. Poopy Butthole as your on-screen battle assistant — and of course, schmeckles are the currency. If all your Mortys get knocked out by a rival Rick, just call out Wubba Lubba Dub Dub and Birdperson will come to your rescue. When returning to the home base, the soundtrack hilariously features Rick’s impromptu world-saving tune “Let’s Get Schwifty.”
Most importantly, this feels like an episode of Rick And Morty. It’s not hard to imagine this exact scenario occurring in a Season 3 episode somewhere along the way. While there are a few missed opportunities to bring in jokes, and not everything that gets said on the screen is as funny as on the show, overall they really nail the tone and dialog.
The Bottom Line: Is Pocket Mortys Worth Your Time?
The only real problem here is longevity. While Pocket Mortys is very fun, it’s also repetitive over time, as you continuously battle a never-ending string of Mortys to earn new badges. There are also a couple of technical glitches – crashes, having trouble connecting to servers to buy things, and so on – but these will likely be resolved in the coming days with a patch.
Things are kept interesting by the exploratory crafting system and the ability to combine Mortys together into new forms, both of which prevent the game from getting too stagnant over time. While Pocket Mortys obviously doesn’t have the advanced mechanics or staying power of a full PC or console title, this is honestly one of the most fun mobile games I’ve ever played, and it’s highly recommended for Rick And Morty fanatics.
