Routes in Pokemon GO are still a broken feature

Routes are a relatively new feature in Pokemon GO, and they are a royal pain in the arse. You have to follow a set path through goodness knows where, and there’s not much to do on them. Sure, you can get some random Pokemon spawning on these routes, but that’s about it. Routes solely exist to give us Zygarde Cells. Sometimes.

Completing routes does give you some rewards, but they are very lop-sided. I went on a walk with my brother the other day, and I got some berries and stardust for completing a route. He got two Elite Fast TMs. And the same amount of stardust. But neither of us saw a Zygarde Cell. And you need a LOT of Zygarde Cells. Zygarde Cells though are very easily missed. I had to look up what they look like, and I still haven’t seen one. It’s kinda ironic how what is supposed to be a scenic route is completely ignored, as you have to be glued to your screen to even have a chance of seeing a Cell. And you can only get three cells a day, which means you need to do 3 routes a day every day for EIGHTY THREE DAYS in order to fully evolve your Zygarde. Zygarde Cells aren’t guaranteed either, so you can do a route and simply not get one, because RNG says no.

But that’s all assuming that the routes actually track your progress in the first place. Ever since they were released, they’ve had problems. Early ones caused Pokemon GO to freeze or crash. Current problems include not tracking progress or constantly needing to restart the route for it to work. Luckily, now, there is a way to fix some of these problems. Turning off Adventure Sync does solve some of these problems, but turning off one feature to make another feature work is fucking stupid. Personally, I got stuck with routes constantly pausing and unpausing, and I had to turn off my Adventure Sync to make the route actually work.

And then routes need to actually exist. For the first month and a half, Cyprus didn’t have a single route. No one could make them. It wasn’t until late July that we finally got a route approved near where I live, and that was it. One single route. We’re in September now and there are only a handful more routes. It was only in the beginning of September that creating routes was opened up to more of the player base. But whether those routes actually get approved, that’s anyone’s guess. The local Pokemon Nerd (he’s a nice guy, very knowledgeable) has made multiple routes, but only one of those routes has actually appeared. I tried making a route and it would crash constantly, so I gave up. I think I might have to turn off Adventure Sync again to make a route.

But it’s not just making routes. Routes are approved by Niantic and come in four different flavours: they get approved immediatel; they get declined immediately; they take a lifetime to get improved or declined; or they get approved then get randomly deleted for being dangerous, some time in the future. It’s almost random, and it makes actually populating the game nearly impossible.

Really, routes needed a lot longer in the oven. They still don’t work and are completely random in so many ways. Luckily, the event featuring routes didn’t really require doing many of them, but routes as a whole just don’t feel finished yet. Especially since getting routes approved is random at best.