I’m really digging Pokemon Go.
At 12:30 a.m. Saturday morning I got into the beta for the upcoming game from Niantic, the studio that developed Ingress. I stopped the other game I was playing and immediately went outside. It didn’t matter that it was late at night or that I was in the middle of something else. There were Pokemon to be caught.
Pokemon Go, so far, has been successful in getting me to explore places –even some right in my own back yard — that I’ve never been to before. It brings the magic ofPokemon into the mundane of everyday life, and the minutia of travel become just a little bit more exciting.
Even trips that I usually regret taking immediately had a new sense of purpose: “Damn, I need to go to the grocery store! Well, at least I get to catch Pokemon on the way:” Pokemon Go mixes together the fun of Geocaching with location-based apps like FourSquare, and hopefully will fill the giant Mayorship-shaped hole in my heart. It’s already made me change habits: I walked to go get breakfast Saturday morning, just to get out and try to grab some Pokemon.
Players start Pokemon Go by picking a gender, and a few basic customization options for their trainer. The bulk of the game takes place on a map screen, which shows your real-world location, as well as any nearby Pokemon, PokeStops, or Gyms.
Each player also picks a team — either red, blue, or yellow — and these teams help determine how Gyms work. Gyms function like portals in Ingress. Players from each team can physically approach the gym’s location and battle to control it. They can either leave their Pokemon behind to defend the gym (which is a bit sad!) or train at it to make it harder for the other teams to overcome. The battles themselves are pretty simple (perhaps a bit too simple) and take place in real time, unlike the turn-based battles of the mainline games: you tap the screen to attack, swipe to dodge, and hold down to use a more powerful attack. You can only battle at gyms (so no, you can’t just battle a friend at your house, which is a bit of an odd omission), and the battles are asynchronous — you are fighting the Pokemon other trainers have left behind to defend the gyms, so they aren’t controlling the other Pokemon directly.
PokeStops are where you get your items: Walk close to one of them, and you can get PokeBalls, revives, potions, and other items to help you as you go.
But it did make me really happy that the real-life gym I frequent is a Pokemon Go gym, so that’s pretty awesome. I was also impressed at how close these areas were to me. I live in Davis, CA, by no means a big city, and I’m still within a few minutes’ walk of several PokeStops and Gyms. It’s still not as quite as densely populated with game elements as some of the city areas I’ve tested the app in, sadly.
The actual catching part of Pokemon Go took a bit to get used to — it wasn’t as easy to throw Pokeballs around as I first thought, and a little instruction tutorial would have gone a long way. I also wish that there was some way to more easily find Pokemon. You can use different items (like incense) to attract Pokemon to your location, but there’s no real way to get a specific Pokemon to come out more often. Pokemon appearance is based on real-world geography, but I still wish there was a way to help find and locate specific ones, or at least something that would help point you in the general right direction beside the “distance” meter that just tells you how far away a Pokemon is from you rlocation.
And as much as I’ve enjoyed my inaugural weekend with Pokemon Go, the app is not without its problems. It is in beta (and still in development), and I ran into a lot of bugs, glitches, and crashes.
Hopefully, the bugs and such are ironed out, but there’s also other factors like battery drain: Pokemon Go in just three days used 37% of my battery for the whole week (according to my iPhone’s battery usage), passing every other app I used. It’s probably because of the game’s use of GPS, and I’m not sure there’s a simple solution for that.
Aside from the technical issues though, there are also some tweaks and changes that I hope the game is able to flesh out further before it launches next month.
On the map screen, I wish you could zoom out a bit more, and see more than just the PokeStops and gyms in your close vicinity. As much as it would somewhat ‘break’ the experience, including street names would also be helpful: it could give you some idea of where and how far away the things that you are walking to are, and could also be useful if you are unfamiliar with where you are walking.
Another problem, so far, is actually finding Pokemon. The app is supposed to vibrate when a Pokemon gets close, but no matter what I did I never actually was able to get the app to do that. It did make a noise when Pokemon were close, but that can be hard to hear, and I had to constantly check my phone to see what was popping out of tall grass around me. Hopefully this is fixed in the release version, and it’s also something that I think the Pokemon Go Plus add on — a wearable Nintendo is selling that will allow you to interact with the app without looking at your phone — will help with, as well.
There’s some grinding and balancing problems, as well. In order to evolve Pokemon, you need to feed them a “candy” of that specific evolution line, and though this mechanic is still a little ambiguous, right now it seems like you can only get these by catching copies of that Pokemon over again or hatching them, randomly, out of an egg. To evolve a Rattata you need to feed it 50 Rattata candies — which means you essentially have to catch 50 Rattata. That’s a lot of ‘mons.
Gym battles also need some tweaking — it’s really easy to knock out gym Pokemon even with lower leveled creatures, but can be super hard to whittle away at gyms with really high rankings, or hard to train higher level gyms on your own team, as well. It’s also unclear if I’ll ever really be able to use the Pokemon that I like, or if I will always have to use whichever ones have higher ‘Combat Power,’ if I want to win battles.
There also doesn’t seem to be a direct progression for getting better Pokemon beside catching them over and over, and once I’ve found all the Pokemon in my town, I’m not sure what the hook to keep playing will be, or how to go about “getting better,” aside from luckily finding stronger Pokemon. I’ve been using the app less and less since my first day– not a great sign– and I’ve already gotten almost every Pokemon close by my apartment, it seems.
With any app longevity is also an issue — will I want to keep using it at home, or will it be something I only pull out when I’m travelling? — and there’s also the question of microtransaction pricing (read: I’m worried I may put way too much money into it). Coins are given out freely in the beta, and Pokemon Go will be free-to-play, but many items can be bought with real money. There also won’t be Pokemon trading a launch, and while you can hatch eggs, the app needs to be open to do this, and that’s a function that really should be able to work in the background, instead of needing the app open.
But right now, I’m more amped for Pokemon Go than I was before, and do think it’s something that, with a few tweaks and the right support behind it, I could really get into. Some of my initial worries from before I got to spend time with Pokemon Go seem a bit unfounded, and most of my problems with it are hopefully things that can be worked out over the life of the app. But the basics of Pokemon Go are working very well, and the feeling of hunting down and finally capturing that Pokemon you’ve been looking for is just as rewarding as ever.
