2309: Ingress’ Real-World Cyberpunk Shows Us What Mobile Games Should Aspire To

One of the most popular buzzphrases that mobile game developers use is “console-quality graphics and gameplay”. (This ranks just behind “THE #1 RPG ON MOBILE!!” — as voted by the developer’s mum, presumably.) And indeed, it certainly is impressive how powerful today’s mobile phones are; I remember when Epic first released that cool tech demo showing Unreal Engine working on the iPhone (and it later turned out to be the rather uninspired Infinity Blade) and everyone lost their shit over mobile phones killing dedicated gaming handhelds.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t want a console-quality experience on my mobile phone, and I doubt many other people do, either. In circumstances where the only gaming-capable device I have on my person is my phone, I probably don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and play some sort of battery-guzzling game that looks great but takes ages to load, demands more than a couple of minutes of my time for a meaningful play session and controls like complete ass because touchscreens suck for traditional input schemes. To put it another way, if I want to play games while I’m out and about, I’ll have my Vita in my bag; a device with actual buttons on which I can play games that are actually good, don’t require an Internet connection, don’t try and fleece money out of me at every opportunity and, as previously mentioned, don’t control like complete ass.

Mobile games are very much in a rut at the moment, with the vast majority of the most successful titles being Asian-origin “gacha” games, in which you draw cards/items/heroes/weapons of varying rarity with real money or in-game currency, add them to your party and level them up until they overpower everything the game has to offer. The exact execution of these games varies — Granblue Fantasy looks and plays somewhat like a traditional JRPG without the exploration, for example, while Love Live! School Idol Festival is a rhythm game — but their basic structure and game loop is always the same:

• Log in, get daily bonus
• Spend all your energy points (or equivalent) on either linear main story quests (if you’re trying to level up) or daily dungeons (if you’re trying to collect specific items)
• Draw a free crap card/hero/item/weapon
• If you’ve earned enough premium currency/paid for premium currency, draw guaranteed “rare or above” card/hero/item/weapon
• Use collected crap cards/heroes/items/weapons to fuse with “rare or above” cards/heroes/items/weapons to level them up
• Close game, wait for energy to regenerate
• Repeat

Once you’ve played one, you’ve played them all, with the only real variation being the exact execution of how the quests play out. Even then, they tend to be grossly simplified versions of what you’d get on a full console — Granblue Fantasy’s combat, for example, has very little strategy beyond picking the right element for each enemy and/or overpowering them with overleveled or rare heroes.

It’s this rut that mobile gaming has been stuck in that means I have very little interest in modern mobile games — and it makes the original, bold claims that mobile gaming was something new and revolutionary that was going to take over the whole gaming industry look somewhat laughable.

However, there are some experiences out there that do make good use of mobile gaming’s unique capabilities, and Ingress is one of them. Ingress is a daunting prospect to get into, but I’ve spent a bit of time with it today, and it turns out it’s not nearly as scary as I thought it was.

Ingress is an augmented reality game — that is, it’s a game that overlays fictional game elements on the real world. The concept is that “exotic matter” or “XM” has started leaking into our world, and aliens called “Shapers” are up to some sort of mischief. Two factions have risen up to try and deal with the XM situation in their own way: the Enlightened want to learn more about it and how they can use it to help humanity, while the Resistance want to get rid of it and protect humanity from the unwanted machinations of the Shapers.

At the start of the game, you pick one of these two factions, and that’s your team for the duration you play the game. You can switch sides, but it’s a lengthy process to do so and effectively entails you starting the game all over again, so there’s not a lot of point unless you really need to play for the other team.

Ingress’ augmented reality nature comes in the form of “portals” scattered around the real world. It’s the job of the Ingress players on both sides to proceed to these portals — like, actually go to the places they are — hack them to acquire various useful items, and capture them for their respective faction. You can then use the items you’ve acquired to protect your own portals from enemy attack or go and try to cause some mischief on enemy portals. There’s an overarching metagame that tasks you with linking nearby portals strategically and covering the map with triangles made up of three linked portals to score points for your faction, too, and meanwhile the game’s overall plot unfolds organically in the background with special, live events around the world, video clips that you can loot from portals and all manner of other goodies.

Even its core game loop is interesting:

• Check the intel site for portals you’re interested in visiting/hacking/attacking/capturing
• Go to the portal location
• Hack the portal to acquire items if it belongs to your team
• Attack the portal’s resonators with weapons if it’s an enemy portal
• Capture the portal with your own resonators if you sufficiently weakened it
• Link captured portals together with Portal Keys acquired through hacking — but note that links can’t intersect, so do this strategically
• Form Fields by linking three portals together in a triangular formation, capturing a region of the map for your team and adding MU (Mind Units — overall score) to your faction’s overall rating.

Within that, there’s plenty you can do to mix things up. You can collaborate and coordinate with other nearby players to carry out a heavy assault on a well-defended portal. You can strategise with teammates on what will be the best formation for linked portals and fields. You can post and follow “Missions” — sequences of portals designed to take you on a tour. Or you can simply use the game as an excuse to get out and about to visit some places.

By far the best thing about Ingress is that it’s something that couldn’t be done anywhere other than on a mobile device. Everything about it — the fact that it’s GPS-based, the fact that it pulls information from the Internet, the fact that it’s an inherently social game, the fact that it works best on a device you can keep on your person at all times — is made for mobile gaming: it’s a completely unique experience that simply wouldn’t work anywhere else, and it’s a much, much better experience for it.

Also its cyberpunk-style aesthetic is absolutely gorgeous, with neon, glowing colours on a black background; stereotypical “computer” noises and speech synthesis; dramatic “ping” noises as you approach a portal; and well-produced videos to advance the ongoing plot. It’s an extremely well-crafted product, all round, and best of all it’s completely free to play, with no play throttling attempting to squeeze money out of you at any point by preventing you from playing as much as you’d like.

I spent a good couple of hours just wandering around the local area experimenting with Ingress earlier, and I enjoyed the experience enough to know it won’t be the last time I do so. It’s one of the most interesting mobile games I’ve ever played, and studios considering churning out yet another identikit gacha RPG should take a long, hard look at Ingress to see how to really take advantage of mobile devices as a platform for unique, fascinating gaming experiences.