Nintendo Co Ltd pleasantly surprised its fans earlier this year when it announced that it would finally be making its way into mobile games through a partnership with Japanese social game studio DeNA Co. Nintendo later revealed that it would be releasing five new mobile games by 2017, and fans have been eagerly awaiting news about the first Nintendo game that will arrive on their phones.

Despite some reports to the contrary, Pokemon Shuffle is not that game.

While Pokemon and Nintendo go together like Ash Ketchum and Pikachu, the cartoony cock fighting game franchise is only published by Nintendo, or as is the case with Pokemon Shuffle, merely distributed by Nintendo. So while it is true that Pokemon Shuffle is making the leap from Nintendo 3DS to iOS and Android, it is not actually a mobile Nintendo game.

Nintendo fans may be upset that they still do not know what sort of mobile games the studio will be releasing, but they should be glad to know that it is not Pokemon Shuffle—the game just isn’t very good.

It is true that Pokemon Shuffle has earned a significant amount of money through its heavy use of microtransactions, and the 3DS version has apparently been downloaded over 4.5 million times. Of course, since the game is free to download, that feat is not particularly impressive, especially considering the fact that the game itself has received generally poor reviews, currently sitting at 56/100 on Metacritic with an only marginally better user review score of 6.0/10.0.

“Anything truly enjoyable about the game is ruined by the microtransactions,” Destructoid’s review says.

“There’s nothing wrong with freemium games when they’re done right,” says another review by Lazygamer, “but what Pokémon Shuffle does is reward players with very few benefits when cash is handed over, and that’s just a damn shame.”

If you really, really still want to play Pokemon Shuffle, the game is set to release on iOS and Android later this year (no date yet). There is still no word from Nintendo on what the company’s first true mobile game will be. Hopefully, whatever it is will not be as bogged down by microtransactions as Pokemon Shuffle, but only time will tell.

Photo by S3ISOR