Pokémon Sword and Shield: The Isle of Armor

Pokémon’s first foray into downloadable content is unsurprisingly inconsistent. Sword and Shield had a lot of deficiencies to potentially address, and The Isle of Armor makes an admirable attempt at several while falling face-first into its own problems. Most prominently, there’s a bona fide open world structure this time, with more varied and interesting landscapes to explore. Secondly, the simple plot focuses on a small cast of charming characters, rather than the obtuse adventures of talkative dipshits. Over a hundred previously-excised Pokémon have been re-implemented, and even the underused Gigantamax feature gets more focus this time around.

The open world is still very undisciplined, but the result is a constant stream of dopamine, so it’s not exactly a fault. The complete lack of level scaling, on the other hand, is downright ruinous. SwSh were already arguably the easiest mainline games in the series, to their detriment, and IoA doubles down to the point of triviality. With the combat defanged and the narrative unintrusive, the repetition of the gameplay really starts to sink in. The soundtrack exacerbates this further, being blander than the original incarnation. And of course, no DLC was ever going to fix SwSh’s graphical insufficiency.