While Nintendo's second ever mobile effort, the absurdly popular Pokémon Go, has already won a legion of fans and sent the company's shares through the roof, a lot of people out there will be scratching their heads and thinking "What on Earth is this Pokémon Go thing all about?" Dive in as a long-time gamer takes the plunge and boots up the hottest mobile game of the year.
The premise here is simple. Using your smartphone's camera, the game projects animated critters into your immediate surroundings, letting you capture and battle them. You can also visit real world locations to gather items, as well as team up with and compete with other players.
On paper, it's a clear attempt to take the core Pokémon concept – capturing and fighting little monsters – and take it into the real world with a touch of augmented reality. For fans, that seems like a dream come true, but what's it actually like to play?
When you first boot up the app, you create your character from a limited set of aesthetic options, and are then immediately tasked with picking your "starter" pokemon, just as you would in a standard franchise entry.
Then, your chosen animal pops up on the screen, AR-style, and an upward swipe on the display sends a pokéball (which is a sort of super-high tech, spherical animal cage) flying forward, and within moments … congratulations, you've captured your very first Pokémon!
That action is extremely simple – literally a single gesture – but it's also quite satisfying, at least at first. From our experience with that app, that's
Pokémon Go in a nutshell: It's kind of fun, and a little addictive, but there's not a whole lot of depth on offer.
Having bagged our first Pokémon, the next thing we did was wander down the road to the nearest Pokéstop, which are useful locations tied to real-world landmarks, in this case a local sculpture. When you get close enough, you can spin an icon that pops up on the screen, and are rewarded with a selection of new items, free of charge.
While I hadn't encountered any wild Pokémon during my walk to the Pokéstop, I had a little more luck on the return journey. Strolling along, a vibration alert told me a creature was close by. After a tap on the screen, the Pokémon – a Pidgey – sat there in front of me, ready for catching. After a first missed attempt at flicking the pokéball towards the little guy, my second shot hit its target, and within moments another pokemon was mine.
Tapping around the UI and then closing the app with nothing left to do, my opinion of the experience sat somewhere between enthusiasm and apathy. Catching the Pokémon was in no way a challenge, and the whole thing is over in a matter of moments, but the novelty of seeing it right there in my world, like I'd actually happened upon it in the wild, was undeniably satisfying.
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