Ingress is currently in closed beta and only available to Android users at the moment. There are plans for an iOS version to come. You can sign up for a beta invite and get more details at the http://www.ingress.com/
Watched the video and read some things about it and I still don't get the game or how it works really.
I got 2 invites for it ... used one gave another to a friend... The only thing that frustrates me is the fact that if your in a small town, like myself, finding portals can be a bitch. My friend however wrote up this article about his experience with the game. Not entirely impressed by Ingress, but I haven't played it in an area with a lot of portals. You start the game by needing to build an inventory to be useful. You farm inventory by driving (yes) to portals. In major urban areas, the game is walkable. Orlando is a massive area, with a tiny city grid and very few city dwellers. When you get to a portal, it can be neutral, claimed by your side, or claimed by the enemy. You gain inventory from it by hacking it. The hack action has a higher success rate on portals you control, less on neutral, and high failure rate on enemy portals, plus the enemy portal can respond with hostile action against you that is increased by its level. Leveling is done by valuable actions, like you get 100 points when you hack an enemy portal. Same 100 points regardless of portal level. Hacking itself has a FIVE minute cooldown, meaning once you drive/walk to a specific portal, you click the Hack button, collect prizes/nothing/damage, then either sit there for 5 minutes or move on to the next portal. Meanwhile, you're keeping track how many times you hack each portal because each portal has a four hack limit followed by a FOUR HOUR cooldown. Once you gain inventory, you then start figuring out what you can do with it. At this point in the beta, Google seeded the portal base using post offices, fire stations, and libraries. We can use the Share option in our camera to send an image of a desired portal addition to Niantic Labs, and in about three weeks the portal is active. So right now, we get those three options. This leads to the other major issue, that results in the beta favoring students with available afternoon time. What's true about post offices and libraries? Right, they close early. So since our police force is very well funded, poking around a post office or library after hours for more than a few minutes can win you a greeting in red and blue. And about fire stations, maybe not in California, but at least everywhere I lived up north and down here, cities and counties save money by combining fire departments with police and sheriff's offices. There's a level one portal near the FD/PD near me that I know nobody wants to go near because there are police cameras all over the building and you can't reach the portal node from any surrounding streets. So you start the game at level 1. You hack, at 100 points per enemy hack, zero points for neutral, zero points for friendly. You need 10k points to get to level 2. Until you get to level 2, you can't use any of the level 2 items in your inventory. If your area is dominated by either friendly portals, where you can only gain inventory but no leveling points, or dominated by a high level player on the other side, where none (yes, none) of your inventory can harm their portals, you're pretty much driving to a place where you can play. In my case, there is a UCF student who appears to have played since day one and everything around me is untouchable. Rather than letting low level players make minor damage on high level portals, no, we face the final major disappointment in play satisfaction, progress, and enjoyment: weapons below the level of the portal's components are ineffective. In all the MMOs we know, get enough low level players together and you can down a high level enemy, such as Molly's tree fight post-merger with Besaid. Not in Ingress. Surround a level 6 portal with 100 level 3s and all they do is waste inventory. They'll take the portal shields down because those don't have levels, but the 8 resonators that power the portal don't take damage unless hit with a weapon at or above their level. So the net result is boring. A lot of driving around, waiting for cooldowns, trying to find ways to grind AP to get to the next level but with opponents that know how to prevent latecomers from gaining AP. All the while, you're moving from portal to portal at traffic law speeds and red lights and etc. I plan to keep an eye on the game, gain inventory when the opportunity lands in my lap, take it very casual, and maybe field trip a couple of times to see what gameplay is like in a dense portal area. There are hundreds of lakes in the area, and it seems these are surrounded by portals. That sounds like a walk in the park, literally. I'd be much more immersed without the cooldowns. On the one hand there's a degree of excitement from hacking portals where a cop is going to ask you wtf? But what really frustrates me is the ease that the existing players have of locking out new players from progress once the game is started, and the most powerful portal I need to evetnually attack in my area is in the loading dock of the UCF library. That's accessible by students in the ID card required part of the library itself only, or else I get myself on security camera, a relatively old man, nosing around the back of the biggest concentration of UCF's students, at night, with the lame excuse that I'm playing some game. Nah. Ingress integrates with the other Niantic Labs' app, Field Trip. Field Trip supports notifications (vibrate, ringtone, whatever) when you're near "interesting" things, and you tell it what you consider interesting. One option is to be notified by Field Trip when you're driving by an enemy Ingress portal. If the mood hits me, I'll stop and hack it.
Just got my invite, spent a little while hunting for energy and found an item. My area is dominated by the enlighted so I requested a faction change. Going to head out on the weekend and take some photos for portal locations. The downtown area here is pretty fleshed out but the area in near needs work.
I have one Edit: Nevermind, no I dont. I got an email saying I did, but I aparently used it for my own account? I duno, I thought it was an extra one. Sorry...
I am hearing a lot of people bitching about this game how 1 faction can control and level up the portals making this game very difficult to deal with for new players.
The game is fairly unbalanced at the moment, and doesn't have a lot of substance. Also it encourage people to move quickly rather than reward them locally, so many of the dominate faction here simply drive around to all of the control points. It is interesting if you live downtown in a city, but beyond that, I say learn a sport/think of it as a secondary activity to jogging. Lots of potential here thought, just not there yet.
"Have fun" has this pesky word called fun in it. While the intention of getting people out of the house is initially accomplished, the "fun" part is lacking so people go back to their homes, to their rigs, and continue the self destructive path of hours of video game play while mindlessly noshing on synthetic shit resulting in orange stained fingers, Monster mustaches, and pizza crumbs on your man boobs.
I hate when you bring in brutal reality to this forum. God damn you, Vangelis! Why be athletic when you can just pretend to be athletic playing esports!? Edit: I have no idea what ingress is but it looks hilariously pointless.