A review of the Catholic Pokemon Go rip-off. I'm in the top twenty players in the world.
Originally posted on November 25, 2018
As of writing I am the 15th highest ranked player of the Catholic Pokemon GO.
This is the reason I have fallen behind with my writing. When I started I needed to translate it, which lead to this guide.
What do you do?
Walk around the real world to find digital bread and the Mother of God! You get points for collecting resources (water, bread, spirituality) or for adding saints, biblical figures, and names of Mary to your roster. The resources replenish your slowly decreasing supply (so slowly I don’t know what happens if you run out). You get to ‘catch’ religious figures if you can correctly guess if a piece of trivia about them is true or false.
I don’t understand Spanish but I understand that 2/3rds of the bits of trivia are false. And that you get more points for collecting resources than for correct answers. This is the core of the game but there are other thing to do.
You can add friends to your eTeam to see each other’s scores and climb the team leaderboard. My eTeam of one is 14th highest so not many people are using the feature. If you tap on one of the billboards on the map you can watch an inspirational video. Sometimes you can’t close the pop up until you stop walking. There is also a menu where you can give money to charity for points with the game and with God. Better than the microtransactions I hear are breaking games.
There are probably whole sections I am missing out on as a monolingual fool. There is a guide to nearby places of interests (including Catholic churches) that I can’t navigate.
Can you catch them all?
Maybe not? I have all the Saints and Marys several times over but I only have four biblical figures. I have yet to fins any other than Miryam, Saul, Anitpas and Aaron. I have twenty of each of them.
If you tap on a distant Saint icon but you can see who it is and I have yet to see any of the other Saints. I have left town a couple of times but no luck. This really bothers me and if you have the same issue please tell me. I know @religiousgames on twitter and JC Go had that problem.
Is it better than Pokemon Go?
No. No. Really not. PoGo has the catching game and JC has Spanish language trivia. PoGo is cute and JC isn’t. Yes I’m playing it a lot but I can leave it on during my commute and walk into points.
Is it even any good?
It’s dull and the only fun to be had once the novelty wears off is the dopamine rush from an increasing number on the screen. It’s a waste of my time and I should stop.
The core gameplay is repetitive trivia.
I’ve heard videogames are getting better and better at sucking you into repetitive play loops and holding your attention. Must be true.
Also the sound effects are cheap sounding twangs. Can’t even remember what the music sounded like as I turned it off as soon as I found the menu option. It’s ok looking but lags.
Is it good as a learning tool?
I would actually be more engaged if I could learn >hagiographic trivia. You could easily trick me into learning something. If you’re a Spanish speaking kid you could read the profiles of your Saints and learn about them. From what I can see there arn’t that many questions for each character. It would get old.
Can you cheat?
Watching the global rankings, a user called www.jw.org has got 150,000 points in the last day or so. Almost as much as I’d got after two weeks of daily play. I have collected points on a slow moving bus. Go too fast and it gets confused.