Genre: Augmented Reality
Developer: Niantic
Publisher: Nintendo

Given the perpetually-outmoded state of Nintendo's hardware, Pokemon Go represents the current technical pinnacle for the series-- and it doesn't disappoint, especially on expensive phones with high quality 1080p+ screens and powerful GPUs. The Pokemon 3d models are high polygon count and animate wonderfully; in the augmented reality scenes, they take on a surrealistic look. The menu system is razer sharp and modern in appearance, featuring ultra high resolution sprite icons. Most importantly, every aspect of the design, from the styles to the color schemes, is totally in accord.

Long-time Pokemon composer Junichi Masuda wrote the music for this one, and for better or worse, it has the strange "pristine, professorial pre-teen exuberance" concoction going for it just like the rest of Masuda's work on the series. The Pokemon sound effects were clearly recorded from a GameBoy, which is an obvious play to the nostalgia crowd.

Pokemon Go is essentially a re-skinned "Ingress", except with the "portal" mechanic replaced by random field encounters featuring Pokemon. These encounters play out by flicking a Pokeball on to the encountered Pokemon. There are some-- quite literally-- unexplained nuances to that simple action, but they can be safely ignored without erecting a significant detriment to the experience. There are also "gyms", into which players can park Pokemon in order to gain premium currency.

Where Pokemon Go's aesthetic is so attentively arranged, the game's actual mechanics are not. A couple of examples, simply to paint the picture: Pokemon are only leveled up by collecting many hundreds of duplicates; predictably then, rare Pokemon serve no mechanical purpose, confining a tiny subset of the title's creatures into any sort of purposeful role. Also, absent a stuffed wallet of US dollars, premium currency can only be gained by controlling "gyms"; only the most powerful can reliably control gyms; the most powerful thus have the most disposable premium currency, leading to a self-reinforcing loop. As a game then, Pokemon Go is somewhat a shambles. As a cultural phenomenon and, indeed, perhaps the game that ushers the industry head-first into a new, mostly unexplored era of augmented reality, it is a success-- provided it has some quantity of staying power, which only time will reveal.