''Let's Hunt Monsters'' () is a 2019 geolocation-based

mobile game A mobile game, or smartphone game, is a video game that is typically played on a mobile phone. The term also refers to all games that are played on any portable device, including from mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone), tablet, PDA to ...

developed by

TiMi Studio Group TiMi Studio Group (), a subsidiary of Tencent Games, is a video game development studio group headquartered in Shenzhen, China and offices in Singapore, Montréal, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chengdu, and Shanghai. TiMi generated an estimated revenue ...

and published in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Tencent Tencent Holdings Ltd. () is a Chinese multinational technology and entertainment conglomerate and holding company headquartered in Shenzhen. It is one of the highest grossing multimedia companies in the world based on revenue. It is also the w ...

. The game has an

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...

mode, similar to other contemporaneous geolocation-based games. Let's Hunt Monsters has often been labelled a clone of ''

Pokémon Go ''Pokémon Go'' (stylized as ''Pokémon GO'') is a 2016 augmented reality (AR) mobile game, part of the ''Pokémon'' franchise, developed and published by Niantic in collaboration with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for iOS and Android ...

'' due to similarities. The game is centered around catching digital creatures based on

Chinese mythology Chinese mythology () is mythology that has been passed down in oral form or recorded in literature in the geographic area now known as Greater China. Chinese mythology includes many varied myths from regional and cultural traditions. Much of t ...

Gameplay

''Let's Hunt Monsters'' is based on the player's location in the real world, and the game is centered around moving to find and catch in-game creatures, which are based on entities from

. In order to catch the creatures, players use "spirit orbs" that can be tossed onto the creatures. The spirit orbs themselves are obtainable from "Prayer Drums", derived from real-world locations. The game also contains gameplay elements inspired by

massively multiplayer online game A massively multiplayer online game (MMOG or more commonly MMO) is an online video game with a large number of players, often hundreds or thousands, on the same server. MMOs usually feature a huge, persistent world, persistent open world, alt ...

s, such as "bases" for "guilds" where players can build structures. As of April 2019, there were 302 obtainable creatures. The game allows players to trade digital "kittens" through Tencent's

blockchain A blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) that consists of growing lists of records, called ''blocks'', that are securely linked together using cryptography. Each block contains a cryptographic hash of the previous block, a ...

platform, a feature which has been compared to ''

CryptoKitties ''CryptoKitties'' is a blockchain game on Ethereum developed by Canadian studio Dapper Labs, a company spun-off from Axiom Zen, that allows players to purchase, collect, breed and sell virtual cats. It is one of the earliest attempts to deploy bloc ...

''.

Development

Tencent Games announced ''Let's Hunt Monsters'' on 23 April 2018, and included in the announcement that the game would enter testing in

Chengdu Chengdu (, ; Simplified Chinese characters, simplified Chinese: 成都; pinyin: ''Chéngdū''; Sichuanese dialects, Sichuanese pronunciation: , Standard Chinese pronunciation: ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively Romanization of Chi ...

in early May of that year. It was released for the Chinese App Stores on 11 April 2019.

Reception

The game has been widely labelled as a clone of ''

'', which was released globally three years earlier, but is not available in China. ''Abacus News'' wrote that ''Pokémon Go'' and ''Let's Hunt Monsters'' "look almost exactly the same", citing similarities in features, mechanics, art style, and user interface. ''Let's Hunt Monsters'' was China's most-downloaded game on the country's

iOS App Store The App Store is an app store platform, developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS Software Deve ...

in the month of its release. Sensor Tower estimated that the game had earned more than US$50 million from iOS alone in September 2019, making it at that time the second-highest grossing location-based AR game behind ''Pokémon Go'', which had earned over 25 times as much globally on iOS.

References

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External links

Official website
(in Chinese) 2019 video games Android (operating system) games Augmented reality games Free-to-play video games IOS games Tencent Location-based games Pervasive games Video game clones Video games developed in China Proprietary cross-platform software Blockchain games TiMi Studio Group games