Pokémon Go Review

Pokemon Go

Pokémon Go is the most frustrating mobile game I’ve ever played. It constantly crashes or freezes on me. Now I’ve been good to cut Niantic some slack since I’m pretty sure nobody expected the game to turn into a worldwide phenomenon overnight. They’ve undoubtedly got their hands full trying to cool off the servers and don’t have time to investigate every crash on every outdated Android device. But good lord, it gets annoying having to reboot the game every five minutes, because it keeps failing to track my movement. That makes trying to hatch eggs—a very cool idea, by the way—a painful process. And there have been many times where I’ve gone to an area with a lot of Pokéstops and couldn’t participate in the fun, because the game kept outright quitting on me.

Normally, I would not be this forgiving of such a problematic game, but it’s hard to say no to Pokémon. I was a big fan of the original generation, so Pokémon Go feels tailor-made to me. And when it works, it’s a truly fun experience. I don’t say that from a gameplay perspective, either, because… let’s face it, there’s not much “game” here. Sure, throwing a Pokéball sometimes ends up being a little trickier than you thought, but the gym battles, if you even care about them (or rather, if you can even get into a gym without the game breaking), kind of take the fun out of traditional, turn-based Pokémon fights. It’s the act of collecting that makes this so exciting, that every time you boot the game up, there might be a rare Pokémon nearby to propel you into the cool kids’ club.

Unfortunately, Niantic had to remove the “nearby” feature, which makes it impossible to actively hunt for specific Pokémon. But that hasn’t stopped me from frequently checking the game to see what monsters are still within reach. Truth is, I haven’t had to walk much to accumulate a lot of Pokémon, anyway. There’s a Pokéstop outside my office, for instance, that almost always has a lure activated thanks to someone else. I’m much too self-conscious to actually go out and find this generous person, however, but I like and appreciate the social potential here. The neatest thing about Pokémon Go, after all, is how it turns real landmarks into Pokéstops, which gives you an incentive to explore and see parts of your city you previously never noticed. I’ll forgive the warts of any game that encourages such. But man… they seriously need to fix these bugs.

Reviewer

Clark
I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.

Published by

Clark

I love gaming so much, I wrote a book about it.