TL;DR: Despite its simplicity, Pikmin Bloom is one of the better AR games on mobile. A more relaxed alternative to Pokémon Go, it focuses more on simply walking around and later checking what you found on your daily journey. No stressful, constant tapping on the screen while walking so you can get all of them pokeymans, Bloom is more about incentivizing your personal fitness goals and collecting some tiny little dudes on the side.
Pros:
+ Great character designs return from the mainline series to make this game feel authentic and worth playing
+ Daily and weekly goals are incredibly satisfying to complete, and the overall presentation is clean and nice to look at
+ There's not a single item you couldn't get by just playing the game, instead of buying microtransactions
+ Original flower models and other assets look incredibly crisp and downright beautiful even on a small screen
+ Completing different challenges and tasks with friends and random strangers are extremely gratifying and create a strong sense of teamwork
+ Weirdly enough, the game's world map is somehow easier to read than many built-in mobile maps, like Apple's iOS Maps and Google Maps (with default settings)
+ No ads
Cons:
- Quite possibly the first glaring flaw I noticed was how you can't send any helpful gifts to friends that have just started playing, except for specifically curated microtransaction boxes, of course
- While there are no ads and nothing about the game is blocked behind a paywall, all cosmetics and even storage upgrades are prohibitably expensive and don't properly match the amount of coins you could ever earn planting flowers. You'd have to walk over 20 000 steps each and every day to ever be able to purchase a significant amount of things in a timely fashion. (Just as an example, I've played for approximately 3 months now, walked around relatively often and can still only afford three cheap clothing pieces or the cheapest storage upgrade available.)
- This game might just have the worst player/community support out of all of Niantic's AR mobile games. No major updates in ages (even with Pikmin 4 having been released with new pikmin that definitely should be in Bloom, too), and there's no button in the settings to suggest new areas to add points of interest to, like there is in PokéGo and Ingress.
- Lack of PoI variety is also a problem, as points of interest are always just nearly useless Big Flowers (large flowers that you can make bloom to drop flower nectar by planting flowers around it alone or with friends), and different sizes of mushroom (where you and your friends can send your pikmin to attack them. Many players have vocally clamored for any kinds of original enemies from the Pikmin games that you could try and beat in some kind of timed minigame modes or otherwise, yet Niantic has remained characteristically (nearly) radio silent on the matter.
- A game-breaking bug that seemingly the entire veteran community knows by now: if you try to sign up with your Nintendo Account, your game freezes during the tutorial and won't let you progress even if you reinstall the game and continue with the same account. You have to sign up with any other account option instead, which will let you play the game. Insane how such a fundamental part about the game hasn't been fixed yet
Pros:
+ Great character designs return from the mainline series to make this game feel authentic and worth playing
+ Daily and weekly goals are incredibly satisfying to complete, and the overall presentation is clean and nice to look at
+ There's not a single item you couldn't get by just playing the game, instead of buying microtransactions
+ Original flower models and other assets look incredibly crisp and downright beautiful even on a small screen
+ Completing different challenges and tasks with friends and random strangers are extremely gratifying and create a strong sense of teamwork
+ Weirdly enough, the game's world map is somehow easier to read than many built-in mobile maps, like Apple's iOS Maps and Google Maps (with default settings)
+ No ads
Cons:
- Quite possibly the first glaring flaw I noticed was how you can't send any helpful gifts to friends that have just started playing, except for specifically curated microtransaction boxes, of course
- While there are no ads and nothing about the game is blocked behind a paywall, all cosmetics and even storage upgrades are prohibitably expensive and don't properly match the amount of coins you could ever earn planting flowers. You'd have to walk over 20 000 steps each and every day to ever be able to purchase a significant amount of things in a timely fashion. (Just as an example, I've played for approximately 3 months now, walked around relatively often and can still only afford three cheap clothing pieces or the cheapest storage upgrade available.)
- This game might just have the worst player/community support out of all of Niantic's AR mobile games. No major updates in ages (even with Pikmin 4 having been released with new pikmin that definitely should be in Bloom, too), and there's no button in the settings to suggest new areas to add points of interest to, like there is in PokéGo and Ingress.
- Lack of PoI variety is also a problem, as points of interest are always just nearly useless Big Flowers (large flowers that you can make bloom to drop flower nectar by planting flowers around it alone or with friends), and different sizes of mushroom (where you and your friends can send your pikmin to attack them. Many players have vocally clamored for any kinds of original enemies from the Pikmin games that you could try and beat in some kind of timed minigame modes or otherwise, yet Niantic has remained characteristically (nearly) radio silent on the matter.
- A game-breaking bug that seemingly the entire veteran community knows by now: if you try to sign up with your Nintendo Account, your game freezes during the tutorial and won't let you progress even if you reinstall the game and continue with the same account. You have to sign up with any other account option instead, which will let you play the game. Insane how such a fundamental part about the game hasn't been fixed yet