​When I was a boy, if anyone ever asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would always get really excited and exclaim, "A cryptozoologist!" I was addicted to The X-Files and Goosebumps, so the thought of living my life cruising around the world in an RV, searching for bigfoot and the chupacabra seemed like a dream job.

Flash forward to today, and here I sit playing Invizimals: Shadow Zone for the PlayStation Portable, searching my home with the included camera for mythological creatures that can't be seen with the naked eye.

It's not the glamorized version of the gig I imagined all those years ago but, still, it's pretty neat. If I could travel back in time and deliver this game to my younger, more innocent self, I'd probably consider it one of the greatest games ever made. For this grown up incarnation, though, there are a few too many technical issues and dead zones to warrant such a ringing endorsement.

Think of Invizimals like the PSP's answer to Pokemon. You've got 100 mysterious creatures to catch and evolve, battles to wage, tournaments to win and an evil genius to stop from taking over the world. The hook is that Invizimals uses the PSP camera and altered reality to bring the creatures into the real world.

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You and your fellow Invizimal enthusiasts are on a mission to travel the world, collect and catalogue as many of these invisible creatures as you can point your PSP at. The story is told through some decently acted FMV segments, but they're so frequent--and require such long load times--that your patience will be put to the test about as much as your battle skills.

Rather than feeling like you're exploring a fun world full of vibrant locales and interesting characters, you'll instead feel like you are watching a movie with the occasional break for actually playing the game. When you're not watching the story or one of the kabillion tutorial videos, you'll be allowed to actually catch Invizimals, buy useful items, take part in a few additional mini-games and free battle.

Like much of the game, catching Invizimals is pretty cool at first, but gets a bit repetitive after the first few hours. You're supposed to walk around your house and locate these creatures using the PSP camera and a meter that tells you if an Invizimal is near. Sadly, you quickly learn that the process is color-based, which means you can just as easily gather a few items from around the house as your go-to capture locations. Also, I'm a grown-ass man. I have no desire to stand up and walk around every 15 minutes while playing a video game.

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Once you've located an Invizimal, next comes the capture. Most of these camera-focused minigames are actually pretty fun. You might have to guide one Invizimal through an obstacle course or dodge attacks from another while shooting the ground out from around their feet. Some, though, are downright tedious. A couple captures require you to tap the X button while blowing into the mic to guide a flying Invizimal through a set of hoops. Blowing the mic and looking at the screen at the same time, it turns out, is dang near impossible. Also, wind and sound based captures in general seemed really hit or miss. Sometimes they worked really well and sometimes I was ready to throw my PSP across the house.

While a few of the captures are real stinkers, the fighting is quite entertaining. Each Invizimal has four attacks; two light, one quick and one heavy. These are all element based and, like every other game of this ilk, you want to hit your opponent most frequently with the opposite element. While figuring out this paper-rock-scissors fisticuffs, you also have to worry about blocking, activating special attacks and collecting orbs that serve as the game's currency by pointing the camera at them. Timing your button presses grants bonuses and you also need to keep an eye on your life and stamina in order to survive. In short, there's a lot to do here and it's all active rather than turn-based, meaning you'll constantly be looking around while juggling your various options.

That probably sounds like quite a bit to keep up with--because it is--but once you get the hang of it, I found it to be much more rewarding than the combat typically seen in these types of games.

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You can compete in free battles and tournaments as many times as you want or take the fight online in ad-hoc or infrastructure mode (I couldn't find anyone online to try out these features so, sadly, I cannot comment on them). You can also re-capture any Invizimal you want, meaning you're basically looking at a fighting game with a boatload of additional mini-games at your disposal.

Occasionally the camera can get finicky and the more physical nature of some of the captures will be less appealing to older players who just want to sit down and relax when they turn on a game. If it wasn't for the lengthy load times and frequent long breaks in the action to watch the story unfold, my time with Invizimals: Shadow Zone would have likely been much more engaging. But at least when you finish the game you are left with all of the good bits to tackle again and again, with no story segments to bother with.

For this older gamer, Invizimals: Shadow Zone was frequently an exercise in tedium and frustration. However, I'm not so silly as to believe I was the intended audience, either. I can't forgive poor design decisions or the occasional frustrating-as-all-hell mechanic, but I can certainly appreciate some good ideas and clever uses of the PSP camera peppered throughout. This latest version of Invizimals should delight the younger crowd, but older gamers with a need to "catch 'em all" will likely want to stick to the more sophisticated titles in the genre.

The Official Verdict: 3 out of 5

This review is based on a PlayStation Portable copy of the game provided by the publisher.