What up, world! I got another crazy review for you and one that I never imagined doing. Yes, that’s right, this is a review of the outrageously popular app "Pokémon GO." It released in the U.S. earlier in the week and has since taken over most of society. To break this all down for you, I decided to go with an old school approach. This is the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of "Pokémon GO."
The Good: This app is flipping ingenious. Niantic is the developer who previously made the app Ingress which has the same principles behind it. It’s a digital world overlaid on top of the real one through the use of a smart phones, cameras, GPS and Google Maps. "Pokémon GO" does the same thing, but it’s with Pokémon. So since this app forces you to actually position yourself in the real world, what this app has accomplished is truly outstanding. It forces people to go outside and explore! I have never heard of or seen such a phenomenon. I have already being going on walks and exercising for a month, but now I can catch Pokémon while I do it. It works well too because we live in the modern age of technology and almost everyone has smartphones now. This app is the embodiment of every '90s kid's dream. In the game "Pokémon," a 10-year-old kid leaves his home to explore the world and become the very best Pokémon trainer. This app has brought a kind of reality to that idea. I think at one point or another that every kid thought being in the Pokémon world would be the best thing ever. I know I did once. Now, I can literally walk down the street and catch Pokémon on my phone, and I loved every second of it. What makes this app the biggest thing since Swiss cheese is that it is timeless. It came to America in the '90s and has been a huge hit ever since. Also, the app is using generation one of the first 151 Pokémon which is what I grew up with. People still play the games and if anything, this app has probably started a huge resurgence. Nintendo’s stocks rose 10 percent in 24 hours for crying out loud! Let us not forget the pictures you can take. Totally epic.
The Bad: So like I said, this game prompts people to go outside and explore. Well this has caused some problems: namely trespassing. People going where you’re not supposed to for the sake of an app is still breaking the law. While I would hope people are smarter than that, you know they will still do it. Also, people are driving and playing at the same time and that is an idiotic idea. Distracted driving is running rampant though this country, and this app certainly will not make the roads safer because people are idiots and will continue to use their phones in their cars no matter what. This app feeds off of the GPS in a smartphone, and we all know GPS drains the snot out of a phone. That causes a problem with phones dying all the time; however, my phone handles the load quite well and I use an Android Turbo. Now I just barely got to level five which is when you can participate in the gyms, but from what I have seen and heard, the gym combat system is really quite lame and broken. I couldn’t even figure it out to be honest. What I do know is that it is nothing like the actual games and requires just a lot of tapping and swiping on the screen. Also, it is really hard to level up and evolve your Pokémon which is one of the core components of the games. Although it's fun, the app ends up turning into quite the grind; however, the app did just release, and the company is going to address these issues in the future. It is still an app and while easily avoidable, it does have micro transactions built in.
The Ugly: This should come as no surprise, but for one of the most promising apps ever conceived it also has the greatest potential to fail. The app had a soft release in Australia and New Zealand and came out in America in the last week. The app has since been utterly plagued by server crashes, disconnects and lag times that makes the app kind of unplayable. The company, Niantic, has said they are working on the issue, but I do not think they anticipated how huge of a success this was going to be. The servers have crashed once per day since the app launched in the States. It especially happens when you are about to catch rare Pokémon and then the app crashes. This has happened to me more than once and can be quite frustrating. Part of the problem is that clever people are managing to get the app around the world without being in one of the active countries. This is why the servers are being so taxed and there just isn’t enough infrastructure in place to handle the load. Nintendo will have to put some serious resources into this if they want it to succeed. A bit of the scarier side is that now all these phones and thus, people, are now hooked up to a system that tracks their locations wherever they are. Big Bro is watching, yo. The other scary bit is while this app encourages exploration, people will probably end up in some bad places they shouldn’t be. So, please, people be safe out there. At the end of the day, "Pokémon GO" has a lot of promise and it has solid ground work. But if the servers can’t be stabilized, the app may fall sooner that it needed to.
