The Pokemon Company has just announced a new Pokemon game for mobile phones at an event held in Tokyo. Called Pokemon GO, it’s being developed by Niantic, a company best known for their AR game, Ingress (Free). As you might expect, Pokemon GO appears to be an AR game where you can catch virtual Pokemon in the real world, battle them against other players, or team up for major events.
While the Pokemon Company operates separately from Nintendo, I think this nicely demonstrates what we can expect to see from Nintendo’s mobile efforts. It certainly doesn’t look as meaty as a mainline Pokemon game, so it likely won’t threaten the sales of future efforts along those lines, but it does look like it will be a lot of fun for Pokemon fans to play around with. If I had games like this when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have had to use my imagination at all!
To go along with the app, players can pick up an accessory called Pokemon GO Plus which enables a bunch of convenient functions for the game, even when you’re away from your device. The game itself will be available for free on iOS and Android in 2016, and that’s about all we know for sure about Pokemon GO right now. For now, enjoy the official trailer, and when we hear anything else, we’ll be sure to let you know.
