Pokémon Go Review

Pokémon Go is the largest thing that has ever happened to a mobile game and one of the thinnest games it has ever happened to. Niantic maps the creatures onto real streets using location data an earlier project had already collected, and in July 2016 parks fill up, servers fall over for a week, and people who have never bought a game are throwing a ball at a Rattata on a bus.

The walking is the design and the walking works. Everything downstream of it was missing. At launch there is no trading, no player against player battling, and a catching loop with almost no decision inside it, and the tracker that told you which creature was nearby got pulled weeks in and left a hole for months. The camera mode everyone remembers from the advertising is the first thing most players switch off, because holding a phone at arm's length is worse than a plain background.

Niantic did the work eventually, with raids, trading and a competitive league arriving across the following four years, and the game still out earns most console releases. Critics landed in the middle in 2016 and the middle is right. The event was extraordinary. The game underneath it is a collection screen with a step counter, and the story grade is what happens when nobody writes anything at all.