Platform: iOS, Android
Developer: Niantic Inc.
Premise: Pokémon, but in the real world and with pretty much all the strategy and combat mechanics stripped out.
Release Date: 06/07/2016
Between the Darwin Police Department having to issue an official statement asking players not to enter their stations looking for Pokémon or to use the PokéStop, the Tennessee Highway Patrol needing to run posters asking drivers to "Stop before you GO!" because people were having car crashes by trying to hunt down Pokémon while driving, and that whole thing with people going into graveyards or the Holocaust Museum because they're set as Pokéstops, it's been practically impossible to have not heard about Pokemon GO! over the past month. There was apparently some controversy among the Americans about the fact that Australia got access to it first given that we quote "already have dangerous creatures waiting to attack us around every corner", to which I'll simply say that it's probably karma for having pretty much every release arbitrarily pushed back by a month or two for the last forever.
For those of you that have somehow managed to avoid hearing anything about Pokémon GO! (presumably by living in Antarctica), it's an Augmented Reality game for iOS and Android where Pokémon are scattered throughout the real world, so you walk around and attempt to catch them, whilst also getting involved in a massive clan war between Team Instinct, whose philosophy is mostly "Eh, we'll wing it", Team Mystic, whose philosophy is that Pokémon battles should be approached more methodically, and then there's Team Valour who.... hmm. Look, you know the Hunters from Destiny? Whose philosophy was basically "Let's just run at the problem with a knife in each hand raised overhead while screaming 'LEROOOOOOOYYY JENKINS!'"? Yeah, Team Valour is basically that but instead of a knife in each hand they have pokémon. Personally, for me it was a toss-up between Instinct and Mystic, because both made good points. Mystic eventually took it, because I thought the Blue colour scheme looked better.
There are three major things that I'd like to talk about while reviewing Pokémon GO!: Gameplay, Bugs, and its impact on the world at large. Let's start with the gameplay. There are two main aspects to this, the first of which is Pokémon hunting, an exercise which is one part google maps to one part paper toss to one part praying to RNGesus. You walk around the world catching pokémon by throwing pokéballs at sprite representations of them either in a completely CG representation of a field, or superimposed over the phone's camera view. This gets a bit tedious in places where the only pokémon that seem to spawn are Doduos and Zubats, and occasionally for no given reason the ball will just curve to one side.
The second aspect is gym battles. Once you reach level 5, you get told to ally yourself with a faction based either on their ideology or which one looks better. Once you've done this, you can attack other team's gyms at set landmarks with a team of your six most powerful Pokémon. Now, one might reasonably expect that this would be the point at which the classic Pokémon combat experience would rear it's head. No such luck, I'm afraid. Very little strategy is involved past tapping on the screen as fast as you can, holding down the screen to use your special attack once it's charged up, and dodging when the enemy tries to do the same. Winning against a gym doing this lowers it's reputation, and once it's reputation reaches 0 it becomes neutral, and you can claim it for your team by putting your Pokémon on it as a gym defender. Or, as has happened to me on at least 5 different occasions at time of writing, another team can claim it before you have a chance to, and you then have to fight them as well. My understanding is that if you somehow manage to get a Pokémon to stay as a gym defender for 20 hours, you get a payment of in-game currency which is otherwise available through micro-payments to spend on storage upgrades, additional items, or 'Lures' which can be placed on Pokéstops in order to increase the spawn rate of Pokémon around the area. I don't mind the micro-payments so much here, for a few reasons: the first is that at the end of the day, it is a free-to-play game, and they've got to cover things like server maintenance and the ability to eat and pay rent. The second reason is that the items you can buy aren't really an unfair advantage; they're mostly there in case you live in a place where Pokéstops might be few and far between, or if you're hunting for Pokémon in a more remote place and ran out of items.
Speaking of server costs, that brings me rather nicely to my second point: The game started out buggy as all hell, if hell didn't have a QA team. There was frequent server dropping, the infamous 'eternal Gyarados', where the progress bar at the bottom of the loading screen stayed stuck at 1/4 of the way done, and who could forget Schrödinger's Pokéball, where after getting a Pokémon into a Pokéball the game would occasionally zoom in on the ball and fail to load the 'Pokémon captured' screen, making the Pokémon both caught and escaped until you closed and re-opened the game to check. I should clarify; I say it was buggy, because in all due fairness they did patch quite a bit after the launch to the point where, for me at least, it runs fairly smoothly. It's also worth bearing in mind that in the early days it did have something in excess of a billion people playing it at once. however, with that in mind the most recent patch (which I have yet to download for reasons that will soon become obvious) has apparently reset the progress of vast numbers of users back to level one with no Pokémon or items, including items that they had payed for with the aforementioned micro-payments. In addition, one of the things that causes a problem for most people and can't really be patched easily is the fact that it absolutely chews threw battery life. We're talking a rate approaching 1% for every minute of gameplay. However, in the game's defense, 3D graphics as well as real-time maps data and having to connect to servers to figure out where the Pokémon and gyms/Pokéstops are in relation to everything else is the kind of thing a phone processor has nightmares about.
Moving on to the third and final aspect of Pokémon Go that I'd like to talk about here: The World™. The largest playable sandbox in gaming history. The world at large has been an...interesting place since Pokémon Go's release, for want of a better word. I could literally write an entire essay on how Pokémon Go has shaped the world since it's release, but frankly, I don't have that kind of free time, so this will be somewhat abbreviated and is in no way a complete list of all the crazy that's followed the last couple of weeks. Let's start with the bad. We've had people putting lures on more isolated Pokéstops and robbing people at gun or knife-point, we've had people going into Holocaust museums and graveyards hunting Pokémon, we've had people walking into traffic by accident or off bridges, and we've discovered that because the landmarks are based off of an older app that allowed user-submitted descriptions of landmarks (in fairness, it's a lot of ground to cover and I don't blame them for being unable to check over every landmark and church on Earth), the in-game description for the Trayvon Martin Memorial apparently read (and I quote) "a thug who was killed for living a thug life", despite the fact that literally neither of those statements were true.
But then there's the good things; like the fact that it's managed to successfully do what millions in government spending and 16 years of school and parents nagging have failed to accomplish: make me voluntarily go outside and take a walk. There was 'Pokémon Go to the polls', which I'm still not entirely convinced happened at a presidential rally despite video proof of it existing. For every story about someone getting robbed while playing or finding a dead body while playing (No, seriously), there are a hundred stories of people who have met their S.O while playing, who have made friends or who managed to get out of depressive spirals because they were able to convince themselves to get outside. It's done bad, and on a larger scale than one would usually expect for a video game, but in fairness that's not usually the game's fault, it just that people are, on occasion, assholes, stupid, or both. Granted, some bad things have been it's fault, but in that department I'd say that the good probably outweighs the bad.
At the end of the day, the one question I need to answer as a reviewer is "Is it Good™?", And it is, but it's like an early-model thermomix. It's helpful, and you'll probably get a lot of use out of it. However, you should probably know what you're getting yourself into before it bugs out or you encounter a user error and possibly get hurt and/or killed.
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