Well I have had some time over vacation to start using the game and I must say while rough around the edges the idea of it is really cool. I spent a large amount of time when I worked for O2BKids! helping them hunt Pokemon on their GBAs. Now I can walk around and do it for real.
The negatives:
- The game is totally dependant on internet so anytime you are in a spotty area it all oges wonky. I started this out on our yearly trip to Maine which means very slow going as the LTE is spotty and even 3G drops regularly.
- Steps only count when on internet. To hatch the eggs you need steps to get steps you need internet I gather you can see where this is going if you ready my bullet above.
- Combat is very confusing and doesn’t have a learning mode where you can beat up some weak pokemon to learn how the mechanics work. Because I was a bit late to the game due to travel most gyms I found were way ahead of me and resulted in my butt getting handed to me. I ended up wasting a good bit of resources keeping my team alive just to figure out how the basic controls work and I still don’t feel like I have it all down.
- Once you start to do combat and the the hang of finding stops and gyms there isn’t much to do other then find more pokemon, while this is fun it doesn’t seem like they will be able to capture long term users unless they can come up with some new mechanics quickly
Overall the game is really fun and provides some great uses of technology that has been around, but now presented in a more maintstream form. Hopefully they can figure out how to keep new features coming or maybe some other companies can figure out how to succeed where Pokemon Go fails.