I don’t need no stinking tutorial to play Ingress

Shortly before Comic-Con, I was listening to an episode of Geek Priest by Fr. Roderick, and he mentioned a game called Ingress. This game started out as an Android exclusive because it is produced by Google, but they opened it up to iPhone users because of its success. It is a type of game called an ARG – augmented reality game – where you use your phone to layer the game over the real world. Since they released the game on the iPhone store and it sounded interesting, I decided to give it a try.

Well, I can see how this can become an engrossing game. The good part of it being that you do a lot of walking from place to place while playing. The bad part is you can walk into things as you are looking at your phone instead of where you are going.

In the game, you become an agent of one of two groups – the Enlightened and the Resistance – who are engaged in a battle to research and control a new type of energy on the planet – XM or Exotic Matter. These two factions try to collect XM and control portals that are locations in the real world that provide special bonuses in the game. And these portals can be found worldwide.

I made the mistake of jumping right into the game, and did not go through the tutorials – I actually just found out that there were tutorials and I'll have to go through them to understand things better. Needless to say, the game is pretty easy to understand without the tutorials, but to get better at it, some learning is needed.

In any case, the portals that are scattered around the world can be 'hacked' to gather resources. If you hack a portal that is owned by your faction, you get lots of stuff. If you hack a portal controlled by the other faction, you might get some stuff, but you most likely get attacked. This attack reduces your XM energy level, but can give you AP which is essentially Experience Points. Gain enough AP and you level up. During Comic-Con, I managed to get to level 2 by hacking portals along the trolley route and in downtown San Diego.

Along with hacking, if you find a portal that is not owned by either side, you can place a resonator (which you can get by hacking) on the portal to claim it for your faction. You get AP for this, but it also becomes a target. I did this a few times, but my claim resonator was destroyed within the a few hours by enemy agents who were much higher level than I was. Apparently resonators also lose energy on a regular basis, and you need to recharge them to keep them in place – if they get down to 0 energy, they disappear and you lose control.

While I have not gone through the tutorials yet, I did learn that you can replenish your XM energy by walking around, so if you get attacked by an enemy portal when hacking it, you can get your energy back by taking a little hike. Also, trying to attack high level portals when level 2 is not the best strategy – I've done much better by finding unclaimed portals and converting them to my faction.

So far the game is pretty fun. It adds a little diversion to my daily walks (I have a couple of portals near my work) and encourages me to get out and exercise. As you level up, there is also a social aspect to the game where teams plan portal takeovers and such, but I haven't gotten into that yet. Perhaps after I gain a few more levels.

This is post 12 in my Blaugust Challenge.

#Blaugust #Ingress