Posted in: Games, Mobile Games, Niantic, Pokémon GO | Tagged: New Pokémon Snap, Niantic, Niantic Labs, pokemon, pokemon go

Pokémon GO / Snap Event Review: A Fun Tie-In Event

Today, the New Pokémon Snap Celebration Event wraps up in Pokémon GO. This event… well, it celebrated the release of New Pokémon Snap for the Nintendo Switch. It featured spawns inspired by Snap's Lental region, featured photo-taking tasks in Timed Research, and introduced Shiny Smeargle to the game. Let's take a look at this event and see if it was worth the effort.

What worked in this Pokémon GO event

• The generosity of Shiny Smeargle: Niantic has been a bit iffy with the Shiny releases in the past few months. Rufflet dropped as an egg/raid-exclusive with a Shiny rate that seems to not match previous egg/raid-exclusives like Shinx, Klink, and Timburr. Other wild Shiny releases were prohibitively rare. Smeargle was expected to be a difficult Shiny to obtain as it only spawns from photobomb encounters, but I was please and surprised to see that Niantic was allowing fifteen Smeargle encounters per day. That's triple what they normally offer for photobomb encounters during events. On top of that, Smeargle's Shiny rate has been observed by Silph Researchers to be quite boosted. Overall, this made Smeargle quite obtainable, which feels generous from Niantic especially compared to recent events.
• The spawns: Generally, the spawns weren't mindblowing but were enjoyable for a short event. A week of these spawns would have been annoying, but four days made this set of Pokémon enjoyable. What was particularly fun about these event spawns is that many of them were large, which made Excellent Throws easier to hit, allowing for a nice bit of XP.

What didn't work in this Pokémon GO event

• Raids: The raid situation continues to be dire. Tier One and Three raids have been absolutely awful for months, with nothing new since Rufflet and Espurr in late 2020, but even those are hardly featured. Every new event brings what feels like a drier set of species to raids. How Niantic continually bungles raids, which is surely the most profitable aspect of their game, is mindblowing.

Overall

Overall, the only issues with this event are larger issues with Pokémon GO. As a whole, this was a short event done mostly well with a terrific Shiny release handled effectively by Niantic.

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