The setup for Shield¹ is very familiar. More familiar, even, than Sun and Moon. You play a kid who dreams of becoming a Pokémon champion. You wake up in your sleepy town, talk to your mom, pick a starter, battle your friend/rival and set off on a quest to defeat a set number of gym leaders and be the very best.

¹I played Pokémon Shield, but it’s basically the same game as Sword aside from a gym, a legendary and a few wild Pokémon. Take this article as my opinion on both titles.

So far, so similar. In the writers’ defense, there is a short diversion before you leave town, which sets up one of the game’s central mysteries. But, for the most part, Shield takes fewer risks with its storytelling than Sun and Moon did.

Once you’ve chosen your Pokémon (mine was the fire-type Scorbunny) and chatted to the correct people, you board a train and head to the big city. Stepping off at your destination, you immediately find yourself inside the game’s big new feature: the wild area.

The wild area is a national park of sorts that spans most of the map’s center and acts as (to borrow British parlance) a green belt around your first destination, the major city of Motostoke. In the wild area, Shield controls much like any third-person game you’ve played in the past five years, with a free camera controlled by one analog stick and movement by the other. (The rest of the game has a fixed camera.) Much like many modern RPGs, there’s a dynamic weather system in play here, too, which affects what Pokémon spawn.

As you’d expect, you’ll find wild Pokémon in long grass. Rather than appearing in random encounters, though, they are now visible and walk, hop or fly around. This is similar to the Let’s Go remakes that came to Switch last year, but the animations here are more dynamic, and some Pokémon will even leave the safety of the grass to chase after you.

Traversing the wild, you’ll come across ballsy monsters just wandering around in the open. These, I quickly discovered, are very overleveled. They definitely add to the “wild” credentials, but the level cap from previous games (you can only catch Pokémon up to a certain level based on your progress through the game) remains in Shield. Struggling your way through a battle with these Pokémon serves no purpose, as you’ll get more experience doing several quicker battles against regular foes, where you also have the option of catching some new friends.

After a hard day’s battling, you’ll want to set up camp. You can do this almost anywhere in the game, but it’s most useful in the wild, where you might be far away from a Pokémon Center. Camps are the latest incarnation of Pokémon Refresh, a feature from Sun and Moon that itself was a remix of X and Y‘s Pokémon Amie. Here you’ll play with and form bonds with your party, and, in a fresh twist, make curry. This is a pretty silly nod to the UK’s favorite dish; you combine ingredients to create a meal that’ll boost your party in various ways. There’s even a Curry Dex for completionists to fill out.

Dotted around the wild are Pokémon Dens, in which you can battle giant monsters, either with other players or random AI characters. There are also characters to talk to here and there and familiar sights like Pokémon nurseries. While the wild area is impressive, for the most part it’s just a more freeform (and therefore less curated) take on the routes you find in every Pokémon game. The initial rush of excitement at having all of this space to explore subsided after a few milquetoast battles. There just isn’t that much to do out in the wild, and after 15 minutes or so I found myself shuffling towards the big city.