Party Play Is… Interesting

Pokemon GO recently added a new feature called Party Play. The idea is that up to four players can join a group and see each other in-game. While you are in Party Play, you get various buffs and benefits, as well as various challenges to do. Is this feature any good though?

Well, kinda. It’s a neat little feature. You can see your friends on your screen as you play. You can only have four players though, which might screw over families with three or more kids. I think that’s who this new feature is aimed at. Party Play lasts for one hour, and requires a minimum of two people. One person is the host and other players join by scanning a QR code on the host’s phone, or by entering a party code, similar to adding a new friend. So you do have to all be in contact with one another. Party Play ends after an hour, if everyone moves 1km away from each other (it warns you at 500m and kicks you out at 1km) or if everyone leaves the party, so you’re not stuck in it forever.

While in Party Play, you get some sort of buff while in raids, and can see each other on your device. You also get to select a challenge for your group to complete. These challenges are honestly pretty shit and give really shitty rewards. Sure, 30 Great Throws isn’t that hard of a challenge when split between 2-4 people, but getting 6 Pokeballs is an awful reward for doing so. You only get to pick one of these from a random choice of three. Which is a tad boring. Just give us all three tasks and we’ll slowly complete them together. It’s not like the rewards are of any use.

However, the boost to raids is genuinely interesting. It might enable people to two-man raids that were harder to do before. Either way, I can’t complain about a raid buff.

Some other features though aren’t available in Party Play. While you can certainly play raids together, and even join remote raids that you’re not invited to, you can’t do routes for some reason. I don’t get this, surely doing routes together would make otherwise boring and repetitive paths more interesting? There have been bugs t00. People have reported weird things like their pre-made teams being deleted and their custom search strings disappearing. GBL has also been weirdly buggy and laggy, and losing your pre-made parties is pretty hellish for both raids and GBL.

What really sucks though is the special research connected to Party Play. It’s boring, tedious and gives shit results. You have to complete 80 Party Play challenges and catch a ton of Pokemon in order to get… some mediocre encounters with Eeveelutions, and some t-shirts for your character. The clothes aren’t even very good. It’s about as bad as the “A Paldean Adventure” research, except at least A Paldean Adventure can be done passively over time. The amount of challenges required are just insane, especially when you can only do one an hour. Or constantly quit and recreate parties to get more tasks, because the tasks you got before were shit.

Overall, Party Play is a bit of silly fun, but the rewards are very mediocre. It is nice to see your friends in game, but that’s about it. Still, at least it’s fairly harmless.