Pokemon GO, an augmented reality app which uses your smartphone’s camera and GPS to turn the world around you into a Pokemon scavenger hunt, will be launching this July according to Nintendo.
Announced during last week’s E3 press conference — we just couldn’t bring it to you earlier because we had so much other news to cover! — the app is currently in closed field testing and, by all reports, seems to be fairly similar to developer Niantic Labs’ last game, Ingress. Players level up according to the number of Pokemon caught and trained, which will vary according to environment. Nintendo is also releasing a standalone Pokewalker-type device, the Pokemon GO Plus, which will allow users to play the game without their phones.
The Pokemon GO Plus’s actual functionality seems ambiguous (and the above are just mockup images) but it will retail for $34.99 and presumably will release alongside the app in mid-to-late July. The app itself is free.
In the meantime, as field testing is still underway, we’re seeing more and more images of how Pokemon GO actually performs ‘in the wild,’ so to speak. Gameplay will be split between overlaid, augmented reality images of Pokemon using a smartphone’s camera and completely computer-generated environments, which seems to be where battling and team management takes place.
Screens via Polygon.
Successful battles award “Candy” (presumably “Rare Candy”) to evolve Pokemon to their next forms. Polygon reports that Nintendo may run occasional events with the chance to capture rarer, Legendary Pokemon. Trading features are also on the way, but won’t be available at launch.
Oh, and we can expect some sort of integration with the next generation of Pokemon cartridge games, Pokemon Sun and Moon, when the latter releases this November.
(h/t Polygon.)
