We now know how Pokemon Go Basically Works

It was way back in September of last year that we first heard of Pokemon Go, the mobile Pokemon game that would take everyone's favorite collectible monsters and bring them into the real world for battling. While the first trailer was certainly very impressive, since then there's been very little we've actually learned about the game, such as, critically, how it would work.

Well, an official press release was revealed earlier this week which finally answered some of our many questions, and now, we at least have a decent idea how Pokemon Go will actually play.

It's... not quite how you'd expect.

First things first: when you get the game, there will be over a hundred different Pokemon to catch, whose locations will roughly correlate to geographic locations. You'll find grass-types in forests, for example, and water-types by the beach (might want to avoid looking for poison or fire types, for the time being). Once you encounter a Pokemon, your phone will vibrate to let you know it's nearby, at which point you can look at it, and try to catch it by throwing a pokeball: by the looks of things, there'll be no battling to weaken wild Pokemon, you just catch em' and that's that.

Pokeballs, by the by, as well as other items, will be found in PokéStops, which are located at interesting places such as public art installations, historical markers, and monuments. So, if you want pokeballs, you gotta sightsee.

Once you have your squad of pokemon, you can then either join other trainers to form a gym, or, try to take on a gym established by other players. Like PokéStops, Gyms are all located in unique real-world locations.

Battling, the heart of every Pokemon game, works a bit differently in Pokemon Go. Instead of selecting attacks in turn-based strategic battles, your Pokemon attack the Gym's Pokemon, which have been left there by the owners to guard it. While you launch your own attacks, you'll also have to swipe left or right on the screen to dodge theirs. As you defeat the Pokemon guarding a gym, its prestige will drop, and eventually, once it hits zero, you can take control of the gym and station your own Pokemon there as guards. Once you have a gym, you can actually train there (almost like a real gym) to boost the strength of your Pokemon. As you get stronger, both through training and successfully defending your gym, you can assign more Pokemon to help protect it, making it harder to take down.

Of course, you can invite friends to help make your gym stronger, just as you can recruit their help to take a gym down.

While you can use gyms to increase your Pokemon's power, to actually evolve them, you have to capture more Pokemon of a similar type: and eventually, when you capture enough, one of them will randomly evolve. So to get that magikarp to turn into a gyarados, you'll need to catch a lot of psyducks, or something.

Finally--and this is the kicker--the game will be free-to-download, but you can use real life money to buy PokéCoins... which can be used to buy in-game items and Power-ups.

Yep. Power-ups. Looks like we got ourselves a pay-to-win game, here. Will it break the game? Hard to say, especially since the combat seems based more on skill than luck, but either way, I'm not feeling exactly hopeful.

Regardless, despite how informative this was, it doesn't answer all of our questions: for example, how will we capture legendary Pokemon?  Can we trade Pokemon? What kind of power-ups will there be, and will there be different tiers of Poke-balls? What are the 100+ Pokemon we'll be able to capture? Will we someday get more?
 
Hopefully soon we'll get the answer to those, and other questions. But as a basic overview, this ain't bad at all.