Hey duders!

I'm on a bit of an exercise kick at the moment, and I like games too, so PoGo seems like a great little thing to do.

Is anyone playing at the moment? I'm interested as a Pokemon Red fan from the 90's, and if it gets me out of the house, then it's great!

Can anyone playing at the moment let me know what it's like? Thanks!

As someone who has played since launch (with about a year off when my old ass phone couldn’t handle the game), depending on where you live and how good your COVID freedoms are (if you have any), it’s still a potentially solid community.

How much you get out of it depends on what you want to do. If you want to just dex fill, then pretty much every mon will eventually come back in some event, you just have to be patient in some cases. If you want to do the PVP stuff, then you can put together a decent team for each of the 3 leagues (which rotate through) without too much min/maxing or having to get legacy moves (moves that were exclusive to certain events).

Items scarcity will of course depend on where you live: if you live in/near a city, you’ll drown in items, if you live somewhere rural, you might potentially struggle.

New players get a mission thread that power levels you to a decent point relatively quickly, so you don’t spend a ton of time being underpowered.

Regarding the microtransactions, they’re not super bad, but again depending on where you live, you might feel a stronger than comfortable pull towards buying remote raid passes, which allow you to fight ‘boss’ mons without having to be physically near the site where the raid is happening.

There’s a ton of stuff I’m leaving out because there is a lot, but my TL;DR recommendation is: if the idea of walking around your neighbourhood/local park/city looking for your favourite mon intrigues you, then go nuts. If you find yourself bored in a week or two, then you’ll at least have gotten a bit of exercise and can move on to something else.

If you find yourself having fun, the three things I’d recommend are:

1)Using this website: https://gamepress.gg/pokemongo/ as it has a decent amount of articles explaining the various mechanics of the game.

2)If you enjoy doing the raids but can’t reliably get to the locations where they are happening, use the PokeGenie app as they have a section where you can join raids that people from all over the world post up, so if you’re looking for a particular mon, you should be able to get it.

3)Add as many people to your friends list as possible (I think I remember seeing a forum post here on GB where people were adding their friend codes) as you can give each other daily bundles of items which can keep your inventory ticking over if you aren’t able to get out and harvest items yourself.

My friend code is 2643 8529 7024 if you are wanting to stick with the game.

For a while not too long ago, Pokémon GO was the catalyst to getting me to go out the house. It was a great way to deflect some of the stress of.. you know.. So I'd be going around with a mask catching the frequently updated new Pokémon and participating in the community days. They do a lot to keep people going, so say it's probably a great time to play right now.

I've also been thinking about picking this up as an excuse to get out more. Would you say that this is still the best in that genre or is there anything newer on the mobile space making waves?

@apewins: I think it's the best, most straightforward thing on the market. Ingress is pretty insular, the Harry Potter one is kinda crappy and Orna is cool if you want a more gamey feel, but it adds extra steps that I already wouldn't bother with in Pokémon GO.

Unless you live in Japan? Then there's a Dragon Quest one that looks great, but I know nothing about since it's not released here. Japan gets all the cool mobile games.

If your goal is to have an additional reason to get out and exercise, absolutely.

If your goal is to fill out a pokedex (or even just to catch everything released), don't start unless you plan on spoofing your phone. There are pokemon that are literally region locked, including raid pokemon that require large groups to defeat and catch. Region locking a game like this is frustrating.