Never before has the phrase “gotta catch ‘em all" been taken so literally in the minds of gamers.
The long awaited and heavily hyped mobile game “Pokemon Go” has finally hit the American market, and trainers everywhere are ready to become real-life Pokemon Masters.
Pokemon Go is a game that uses the player’s real GPS coordinates to find Pokemon hidden throughout the world. The main draw to the game is players get to use their cell phone cameras to “see” the Pokemon through Augmented Reality. This means that when people encounter Pokemon, they will look like they are standing around in the area. This gives players a sense of encountering Pokemon “in real life,” which is the main basis for the game.
Although the game has only been out for about a week, the game's main strengths and weaknesses are blatantly obvious.
The main strengths of the game come from the very basis of the game of catching real-life Pokemon. Being a kid who grew up with Pokemon, I can say that seeing a Pokemon while walking around, throwing a Pokeball at it and catching it to add it to my collection is something that I have dreamed about since I was a kid. I can say happily that this game delivers a pretty solid experience.
The game operates by walking around and looking for Pokemon to appear on the screen. Once one appears, just click it and it will instigate an encounter with that Pokemon. The only way to get it is by chucking a finite number of Pokeballs one at a time, hoping for those stars to come out of the ball signifying that it is yours.
The other main strength that needs to be said is how crazy addicting it is. While this may sound bad, it is addicting in a good way. It isn’t addicting to where the player feels like they need to be in the game at every waking moment, but it makes the player excited to log in and find new Pokemon to fill in their Pokedex. As a player, anytime that I could log in and play I would do so. I never knew when I would find a new Pokemon to add to my collection or find a high leveled Pokemon to put into my top six.
The game does have some more high points, such as the Poke-spots and overall aesthetics, but the previous two strengths are what really carry the game.
Weaknesses are to be expected from a mobile game of this caliber. The only question is, do these weaknesses take away too much away from the game to keep it good?
The servers are the biggest weakness of the game. I think Nintendo didn’t realize how well-received the game would be as the servers are always busy. This detracts from the game a ton as frequently the servers will be down from over usage. This would be okay, but it seems like the servers are down for very large portions of the day. I have had server waits that took several hours before being able to log in. This really interferes with the immersion of the game and honestly just makes me mad at times.
The other main weakness I have found is battling, both against gyms and wild Pokemon. For gyms, they went away from the turn style battle formula in favor of a button spamming fighting style that really isn’t that responsive. On top of that, there is no way, as of yet, to battle wild Pokemon. This wouldn’t be as big of a deal if catching Pokemon was easier. All Pokemon have to be caught at full health, and the higher level the Pokemon, the harder it is to catch. This means it will usually take many attempts to catch one guy. With Pokeballs being at a premium the farther you go into the game, this can get extremely aggravating. I once threw close to 20 balls trying to catch one Golbat.
To answer my own earlier question: no, the weaknesses do not detract enough from the game to make it bad. The genuine feeling of fun this game brought me cannot be accurately described. While the game isn’t perfect, it is still worth a try for anyone who is a fan of the Pokemon series. Also, there is also word that in future updates, they will add in more features such as battles, trades, Gen. Two Pokemon and a lot more.
Pokemon Go is easy to pick up, fun to play and delivers a fun and different experience. I recommend this game to anyone who wants to enjoy this age old series in a new light.
