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Pokemon Go Review
Pokemon Go released about a week ago, and like most people reading this, we figured out how to install the game and start catching them all right away. When we first played it, we liked Pokemon Go. As someone who hasrun a half-marathon, this author naturally enjoys walking outside. A game where we get to live our childhood fantasy - head out in the real world to catch Pokemon - sounded great. The first few days were fun. And then the crashes began.
In theory you throw a Pokeball and you catch a Pokemon. In practice, you throw a Pokeball and start praying that the app doesn't freeze before the Pokemon is caught. After a point, every throw turned into a prayer ritual and we weren't ever sure if we'd caught the Pokemon.
That is when we devised a two-phone strategy to ensure that we caught the Pokemon. We caught a Pokemon on our iPhone 5s, saw the app freeze with a spinning Pokeball icon on the top-left. We whipped out our OnePlus 3 to check if the Pokemon had showed up in our account. If yes, then we force quit and restarted the app on our iPhone. It did show up as long as we were patient. The experience was the same when we used the OnePlus 3 to catch Pokemon.
This is the best feature of Pokemon Go. Syncing works perfectly. If you catch a Pokemon on one device, it shows up on the other one immediately. Any other changes to your Pokemon account reflect instantly. We used it to great effect in order to counter the app's numerous issues - constant crashing, freezing, failing to load the map, freezing when you tap a gym, freezing for over 10 seconds after you start a gym battle, among others.
We're lucky enough to have two smartphones to play a game that hasn't even officially launched in India, but most people are just going to have to suffer these issues with Pokemon Go. We've spoken to plenty of Pokemon Go players in India and their complaints mirror our own.
The game has other issues too. The game doesn't work at all on 2G and its performance is good only if you have a stable, fast 3G or 4G connection. This is a problem because we feel every developer should program apps keeping poor connectivity in mind. People are bound to hit spots with poor coverage everywhere across the world.
There are not enough Pokestops or gyms in many areas across India. For a country as densely populated as India, that spells doom for new players. The game definitely needs some kind of a matchmaking system. Most Pokemon gyms are ruled by overpowered players who've already hit level 15 or 20. Battling against their 750CP (combat points) Pokemon is not going to help new players whose best Pokemon has 200CP at best. The developers need to figure out a system where players are matched by level or by the combat points of their Pokemon so that there is some parity to battles.
The same few Pokemon keep spawning over and over again in the same areas. Gadgets 360 staff members playing the game in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru have caught way too many of Doduo, Pidgey, Rattata, and Geodude. Other Pokemon don't spawn that often. Naturally some Pokemon are more common than others, but the developers need to figure out how to distribute these more evenly.
Pokemon Go isn't officially available in India, but if Niantic and Nintendodidn't want people to play it in India, they shouldn't have made all of this game data available. If there are even two or three Pokestops and a few Pokemon available, people are going to find ways to download and install Pokemon Go in India and play the game.
At its heart, Pokemon Go is fun to play. That should come as no surprise as the game has gone viral. We don't think it's fun because it's a game that uses augmented reality. Heading out in the real world staring at your phone isn't going to work for every game. The fact that it has Pokemon, these weird monsters from the anime series, is at the heart of its appeal. If not for Pokemon, this would be just another AR game that few people know and love and the rest ignore.
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