If you want my one sentence review of TemTem here:
Fair gamer, you think you want a Pokemon MMO, and I'm here to tell you that you don't know what you're asking for.
As far as monster battlers go, this game has a battle engine that takes Pokemon's and refines it in a way that feels refreshing by enforcing 2x2 battles.
If you are not familiar with Pokemon, or monster battler games, this means that your monsters will fight with a partner, meaning there's a lot more significance to making sure they play off each other well. There's strategic depth to mine here.
The monsters themselves range from pretty cool to not great. However, very few of them feel very memorable, even as incredibly ugly or very cool. It's mainly mediocre and serviceable, with far too great a preference for anthropomorphic designs. Now that doesn't sound like a problem, more popular series like Digimon and Pokemon exist and function, but given that Tems are supposed to live in an environment and are animals, it creates this odd dissonance in the world. Most monster battlers use real life animals as a means of base templates, and spin it. I find that when TemTem follows this route, the monsters tend to be cuter. But the more abstract Tems fall flat, and even worse make you go "How do they live in this world?"
In the end, There's probably a Tem in here that you'll go "Oh that one's cute, I like them, and they're fine too" so you can bumble through the floating islands and find and make new friends to fawn over. I like Skunch and Mudrid.
As a single player experience, TemTem is fine. You'll make friends and enemies as you wander through several floating islands as a Youths solving problems that adults should be handling with monsters. You will be frustrated by characters, but you will be constantly ushered along solving world crisis and earning badges. You will not remember the story. It's not challenging, and even the slight thematic jabs at Pokemon don't make sense in-universe (such as the Free Tems movement). You're going to learn about friendship and forgiveness and how catching Tems is Cool.
If you want a game where you can breeze through a story, catch a few monsters, make them evolve and save the world, there are plenty of worse ways to waste your money. It's 40 bucks. There are other pet/monster battlers on steam right now with smaller budgets and pixel art that you can probably play but they're all in various states of alpha/beta, and this one being as close to 1.0 as it is, at least we can say it's "done" enough for you to have An Experience.
You want to PVP, right? You're probably tired of Pokemon, burned out on Smogon, or whatever. And you ALSO heard that a number of the Devs are ex Pokemon pros or at least high level Smogon players. And while that IS present in how the combat does feel like it "Works" (I'm not going to talk about Meta in this review, patches and balances will date this review.), the game commits the crime of wasting your time to GET to the part of the game that you want, and also hamstrings it's own ability to HAVE a healthy meta because of the forced MMO aspects of this game.
You see, you need to be online to play. That's because to ensure Engagement with the game, Crema is enforcing grind to keep you playing. You cannot hack your team and try a new build. You cannot breed infinitely, you must keep grinding out more tems, and even as you breed up, their ability to breed is further hampered. You're trapped in a funnel of grind because the game wants to revolve around an Auction House MMO mechanic. In Pokemon, you can hack your team in and participate, and as long as you are NOT cheating, you can participate and make whatever team you want. Because at the end of the day, your team build will carry you or not. TemTem enforces a more serious time sink into the game before you can engage with PvP with little to do outside of that.
And because the market will always be inflated, unless you are an early adopter, you're going to suffer for it. And because this is an INDIE game, the audience will be limited, so unless this game magically garners an enormous audience on launch, there ARE going to be haves and have-nots. And if you're reading this review trying to determine that, you're a have-not!
Monster battlers and MMOs do -not- mix, especially because the game is not structured for MMO gameplay. It is a single player experience that expects you to belay for one another up through the story, meaning you have to repeat content you -just- did. You have to choose who gets to catch any monster that you come across, and the rewards are split in a way that's punishing for both players. Playing co-op battles is fine enough and having to plan with someone else is something you might enjoy, but the game wants to kneecap that experience. You are not encouraged to team up with a stranger like an MMO, and the battle system isn't forgiving enough for a lack of coordination.
Raids are where the MMO action happens, but again, battling is such a single player experience that you're not actively working WITH someone so much as being in the same chat room and you both have a similar goal. The choices aren't there. And again, it's just a grind. But this is a social experience, and with a social experience you have to have a sufficient enough population to encourage raiding, especially given how far into the game you HAVE to be to start doing that.
MMOs have an entirely different core loop that encourages you to play by yourself, or with someone, and then loop you into a group activity. This game wants you to play a single player game long enough to then be encourage to play with other people. Temtem relies on you being limited by the tems available to your area and your level. That means you can't have social gameplay because again, you are only able to trade with people who are either a) at that part of the game or b) have completed all the content, but by virtue of being a Pokemon-like, you can just simply keep progressing through the story and have all the resources you need to finish the game without ever interacting with someone.
"But all MMOs can have that problem!" You're right, but you know what other MMOs give you the benefit of? Alts! When you're playing an MMO, and you want to try the game again, there's an entirely new experience you can have by switching classes. TemTem -can't- work like that because you will ALWAYS have that experience. Mages will have to play differently in group dynamics. In TemTem, you're always going to have the same pool of Tems unless you are enforcing some kind of rule upon yourself. The game will always play the same. And without a strong narrative for you to go through and re-experience, I really don't know what you're going to stick around for. The story content is essentially done. There's going to be a post-game island but it's just more grinding.
Just wait for there to be a TemTem Battle Sim and play that. The tems are all online, if you want to see them you can pull them up here:
https://temtem.fandom.com/wiki/Temtem_(creatures). Adorable.
Even if you want a good PVP experience, you haven't JUST been sold that. Monster Catchem Ups rely on a world of media that you can dive through and imagine and explore. How many DECADES of Digimon have you probably consumed, even passively? Or Pokemon? These worlds rely on media and cultural saturation. You don't want to just be good at fighting numbers, you want numbers that look cool. You want to see ZapDog and you secretly love knowing that they rub their cheeks on trees to knock down PicoApples. It makes knowing that ZapDog's move pool is good and their stats are garbage but man, you bet you could build a team around him and meme it out online.
An MMO is a social experience but as it stands the social interactions are fighting against one another. There isn't enough TemTem media for you to consume outside of TemTem to keep you interested.