Pokemon, what can I say, it's pretty much my childhood in a bottle. Has it lost some of its creative spark since its inception? Perhaps, but thanks to smartphones, The Pokemon Company has decided to leap into the mobile gaming market headfirst with Pokemon Go; a game where you travel around your real life neighborhood and beyond to try to complete the Pokedex. For many fans of the series, this is a dream come true. Traveling around and capturing your very own Pokemon from various areas and visiting a number of Pokestops is an amazing concept, and at the beginning, I couldn't put this game down. However, as the weeks began to roll by, the game's flaws and questionable mechanics to power up your Pokemon started becoming very clear.
Gameplay is much different compared to the main games of the series. For every Pokemon you catch, you get 3 Candies attributed to its first stage of evolution, along with 100 Stardust Points, and experience for you, the trainer. You get 600 points of experience for newly caught Pokemon. The higher your trainer level is, the stronger the Pokemon you'll encounter on occasion. You can also transfer Pokemon with lower Combat Power (CP) to the Professor to get one candy per Pokemon. You use the Stardust and Candies to power up your Pokemon. There's only one problem, in order to evolve your Pokemon, you need a certain amount of Candies attributed to that certain Pokemon. Doesn't seem like that big of a deal?
Here are a couple examples for Candy requirements:
An Eevee requires 25 Eevee candies to evolve. You only get 3 per caught Eevee. How do you get enough Candies to evolve it? You have to catch more Eevees. 27 of them is what's required to accumulate enough candy to get each evolved form, thankfully there's a workaround to get a Jolteon, Flareon, and Vaporeon. What about 3 stage evolutions? For many of the 3rd stages, you need 100 candies to get them to their final evolution. How about Magikarp? The candy requirement to evolve it into Gyarados is 400! The game wants you to either catch more than 130 Magikarp, or luck out on hatching eggs that you get randomly from Pokestops, which hatch random Pokemon that give you more candy than the usual 3 to get to the required number. Obnoxious Candy requirements and being forced to catch the same Pokemon multiple times are incredibly stupid ways to make progress through the game. Why can't it just be Stardust, along with battles for powering up your Pokemon, and when it gets to a certain Combat Power (CP), it will evolve. Then, if you capture an identical Pokemon with higher CP, you can send it to the professor to get Stardust back. This game would be completely fine without the Candy mechanic weighing it down.
The game has built in achievements. For example, if you caught 50 Flying type Pokemon, you get a medal. Do these medals serve a purpose? No! What is the point of giving us these medals without giving us some incentive to complete these?
Finally, the wild Pokemon AI. This is without a doubt the worst part of the game. Pokemon can break out of Pokeballs, and run away. The problem lies within the frequency of times both of these things can happen. You can go through 6 or more Pokeballs on one wild Pokemon, only for it to run away, which is pretty much a giant middle finger to you, the player. The game has Raspberries to give to prevent them from running away. Only one problem, even if you give a Pokemon a Raspberry to prevent it from running, it can still run away after 1 Pokeball. It's also become very clear that Niantic has increased the chances of Pokemon escaping from Pokeballs along with their odds of running away since the game's release. It's almost if they are trying to squeeze as much money out of us as possible to buy more Pokeballs.
Needless to say, I had very high hopes for this game. I expected this to be a game changer for the mobile market. But, all it does is just blend in with a lot of the free-to-play games that are out right now, and blending in is the one thing you don't want to do. Pokemon GO gets a very disappointing 5 out of 10.
Graphics: 7.5
Music: 2.5
Fun Factor: 5