The game uses many of the phone's features to impressive effect. It uses the GPS to build the gameplay area in the player's actual, physical environment as well as to locate the player in the playing field. It uses the compass to know which direction the player is facing, as well as provide an on-screen compass to aid in navigating the play area. It uses the camera to provide an augmented reality view of the environment. It uses the accelerometer to switch between the map mode (when the phone is held flat) and the ghost capture mode (when the phone is held upright).
When one begins a game in SpecTrek, the app gets a GPS fix to determine the player's location, which then becomes the center of the real-world play area. A short game has a fifteen-minute time limit in which the player must find and catch all of the ghosts that spawned in the play area -- a circle with about a 410-foot radius. In the few times that I played, the number of ghosts ranged from three to five.
I played the first game of the day by myself. First I held the phone flat to get a look at the map. It showed where the ghosts might be, so I immediately headed off toward the nearest one. The first one was on private property, and it was outside of my capture range, so I had to write that one off. The next nearest one was just south of my current position, but when I approached it, I got too close without capturing it and it ran away. By this point, I only had about four minutes remaining and I hadn't captured one single ghost yet. So I ran to the far opposite side of the play area where there were three ghosts hanging around. I wasted a whole minute trying to catch the first one who always managed to evade my sights. Two more were due north of me, so I ran that way and found them both hanging out together between a fence and a shed. I captured them both, back to back. Only 40 seconds remained in the game now, so I ran back to the one I had failed to capture just seconds before...and I caught it without a problem. Time expired six seconds later and I had managed to catch three out of five ghosts, all within the last three minutes of the game. What a thrill!
I enjoyed the game so much, I purchased the full version. It's well worth the $2.49 price tag, no doubt.
Then my brother-in-law Kevin joined me and we sought out a good place to begin the game. We estimated that the best place to start would be the place that would give us access to as much of the play area as possible, hoping to avoid the problem I faced with the unreachable ghost in the private property. Even on the smallest setting, the play area was so large that it extended into areas we could not reach no matter where we centered it, so we just did the best we could to be strategic about it. We played three games before the battery died on my phone, two of which we were able to win by catching all of the ghosts within the time limit. I gained enough experience to level up after the second game, so I spent my skill points on increasing the capture range so that I could capture ghosts who were farther away in areas that I couldn't enter. We played one final game to take advantage of this upgrade, and it worked very well.
The only problem I discovered with the game was a glitch with the map. It would occasionally lose track of where we were and try to say that we had suddenly teleported a few hundred feet northeast. I found a workaround that seemed to fix it each time it would happen though: Go back to the info/summary screen, wait a few seconds, and then press Continue to go back into the game. That seems to resync it correctly.
Ah, what a fun game! It's disappointing that the winter months are coming and will make it difficult to play this game since it requires a lot of time outside. I'll just eagerly await the return of spring and use this game as a great excuse to get out of the house and get some exercise from time to time.
TL;DR: SpecTrek is a very fun augmented reality game that is well worth its low price.
