Last year’s Spectrobes on DS sold around a million copies, but I have heard tell that critics found it lacking in substance a bit. From what I saw at Disney Interactive’s E3 booth, though, they’ve fleshed things out.

For monster-collector nerds like me, it’s exciting to know that Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals has doubled the number of Spectrobes you can unearth through touch-screen archaeological digs, and it looks like they’ve expanded upon the battle system, too.

So how does the new Spectrobes stack up?

It’s no Pokemon, but it looks cute and complex enough to possibly be fun. You play as either Jeena or Rallen, interplanetary police officers, and as you traverse the story you unearth fossils that you can take back to your ship to make into creatures. Each one has a child form, an adult form and an evolved form, and, paging through the scrapbook of character designs, I was thoroughly impressed.