Reinstalling Pokémon GO for Exercise

Pokémon GO came out back in 2016, it was probably the most fun I had any summer. Since our place at the seaside is quite isolated I had to travel to catch anything and find more pokestops. I would cycle for about half an hour to get to the city, spend half the day there and go back home. Considering I get very lazy in summer it's amazing how much I went out to have fun.

A couple of days ago my girlfriend decided to reinstall the app and I went along with it, since we're stressed out with uni and don't go out much it was a great idea, she played as much as me if not more. We haven't walked this much in the last couple month as much as we've walked in the last 2-3 days. We got a couple more people hooked and play together.

Now for the changes in the past 3 years. There are a lot of new pokémon, they included 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations giving evolutions to some 1st Gen pokémon. I was sceptical at first since I only played pokemon red/fire red, and emerald, but after some time I got really into it.

Heres how much we've walked in less than a week!!!

For some newer pokemon evolution stones are required which is new, there are a couple of ways to get them such as pokestops, battling trainers/leaders. I collected a couple but they seems to be hard to get by. Here's how they look.

For catching pokemon a couple berries were added, a new rare berry that helps catch pokémon better. Bananas that makes them avoid less and pineapple that give more candy for evolutions and power ups when the pokémon is caught. Also stardust isn't required for evolutions anymore (which were very expensive).

Besides the pokémon there are also new gaming mechanics added such as raids, and the gym system changed to give an adventage to lower level trainers.
Raids are a way to make more people act together to defeat harder pokémon and get better rewards, the strongest I've seen was with 50k CP which is insane, after winning you have a chance of catching the pokemon you defeated.

You get a limmited time to defeat the boss and the whole raid has a limmited time before eeturning to become a gym. Theresome time before the raid becomes active though, allowing you to get to it in time. The raid boss starts with an egg which has a timer, when it reaches 0 you can start fighting the boss. You only get one pass for raids per day so use it wisely.

The gyms are much easier to defeat now, the pokemon in the gyms constantly lose health with time and the whole gym level system was taken out which was tedious. Now anyone from the same team can join a gym up to a limit of 6 pokemon ( 1 per person). Also you dont have to collect coins like before, you get the reward when your gym is defeated up to a max of 50 coins per day.

Another great features I think is amazing they added are friends and trading, this way you can give away doubles and help other people out. You can also send each other gifts once per day with a chance to get a poke egg that hatches into baby pokémon.

Some new items were added to the game, rare candies let you pick which pokemon you want to give candies to, and TM-s let you change a pokémon's quick or charged attack.

The last thing I'm going to talk about are missions, I think this is the best thing they added to the game. You get exp and rewards for clearing them. There are field missions you can complete or throw away, you get new ones when you spin a pokestop. Theres also special missions where you get to catch some rare pokemon and win rewards after every 3 missions.

I hope this post got some people hyped to try the game out again, get some exercise and fresh air. Good luck with your adventures.