Fun, but...

The enjoyment of this game is heavily reliant on where players live or work. I can go to school and tag no fewer than 40 unique Pokéstops, but when I wasnt a student, I was lucky if I could find any. While I know the speed cap has been put in place to get people to walk, and I do when I am at school, the place where I live is not walkable. When I had to drive to and park my car near the closest Pokéstop in order to tag it at all, it seemed unfair. Now that Im going to a place with so many that gameplay has become trivial (and I went up 500k in experience in only a week, as opposed to my previous time of 2-3 months), I realize it is more unfair than Id first thought. I went to visit my cousin in the country, and even with incense he was only able to find a total of 6 Pokémon on our hour-long walk. No Pokéstops.

I understand the desire not to let us drive recklessly, but in that case, let us put more Pokéstops in parks and trails, places where people go for the purpose of walking.

Theres another reason I rated this app only four stars, and its name is Sunflora. Sunkern is a moderately common Pokémon, which is very nice, but it requires a Sun Stone to evolve. Thats fine, except that Gloom also needs a Sun Stone to evolve into Bellossom, but it doesnt need a Grass Stone to evolve into Vileplume. This creates a choke point which forces the player to choose between three options: Evolve Gloom to Vileplume in order to save the stone for Sunflora, evolve Gloom to Bellossom and throw out/avoid catching the useless Sunkerns, or grind Pokéstops for more evolution items (which is a pretty futile effort; in about 3,500 or 4,000 spins, Ive received only 8 evolution items, including one that was a 7 day streak bonus, making not very roughly a 0.2% chance to get one in any given spin). Its not that the stones themselves are the problem. It is specifically this scenario. The Up-Grade only works on Porygon, a rare Pokémon. The Metal Coat works on Onix and Scyther, also very rare. Kings Rock works on the common Slowpoke and Poliwhirl, which both branch evolves. The Dragon Scale works only on Seadra.

This new streak bonus helps balance things, but unless the sun stone is a lot more common than the others, players are going to end up with fully evolved Steelixes and Kingdras and fistfuls of extra stones, or with hordes of Sunkern candy and nothing to evolve with it.

I still had to give four stars to this app because the game and its events are fun. I would like to trade with friends soon, though.

SilverShoelaces about Pokémon GO, v1.29.1