Party Play Is Pretty Good Now

With the end of the Season of Adventures Abound, we got an event revolving around Adventures Abound’s biggest feature, Party Play. Party Play allows you to team up with up to three other trainers, see each other on the overworld, do research tasks together and take on bosses more easily than ever. The event, Party Up!, celebrated the feature and also brought back the new generation 9 Pokemon and the new shinies from the season.

When Party Play originally came out, it was a bit underwhelming. Not only did it come with a bug which could delete all your saved parties for PvP and PvE, but it just wasn’t very interesting. You could do a joint research task with your fellow players, but the reward wouldn’t be very good, and you’d only get one. If you wanted a second joint task, you’d have to leave the party and rejoin. Now, when you complete a task, you get the reward, then the party host can choose a new one. There were a few bugs where Party Play would trap you on the task select screen, but this has been fixed.

However, the rewards for these tasks isn’t great. Tasks range from catching 14 Pokemon with weather-boost for 200 stardust, to catching 25 Pokemon for 6 Pokeballs, to making 20 Excellent Throws for one Max Potion. The rewards are honestly shit, even if the task is split across all players in a party. But the tasks used to be a lot harder. It used to be 75 Pokemon for a similar amount of Pokeballs. Sure, each player only needs to catch half/a third/a quarter of the Pokemon required for the task, but 6 Pokeballs is still a very small reward. Especially since I swear Party Play also increases the rewards you get at Pokestops. You normally get 1-4 Pokeballs from a Pokestop, but while using Pokeplay, I was getting 6+. Way more than the Party Play tasks.

The real winner though is the Party Play raid boost. When in a party and doing a raid, a button appears in the raid screen. It fills up as you do fast attacks and, when pressed, basically does double damage on your charge attacks. It doesn’t last long, and you can often only get one or two boosted charge attacks off, but it does work. With it, I managed to duo a Coballion raid, despite not having the best Pokemon available. I had 20 seconds left, and would have failed it without Party Play. The boost best works with spammier attacks like Breaking Swipe and Sacred Sword, which charge quicker and can be used quicker. Raid boosts are separate for each player, but if you’re going to be raiding in a group, you might as well make a party, it doesn’t take long to do.

All that being said, the Party Play research is still fucking awful. You need to do 10 tasks for the first stage alone, and all it does is reward an Eevee. And you need to do like a billion more (well, closer to 30) to finish the research. Sure, you get some t-shirts, but they’re not very good.

Still, Party Play’s buffs are pretty good, especially if you do raids with a small number of people. But it is also pretty skip-able too, if you only ever play on your own. The features are nice but you’re not missing out on anything.