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So, the fundamental gameplay loop of Pokémon proper (the original three, anyway) is that you have grown old enough to train Pokémon of your own, and after being gifted one by the town Pokémon professor you then go on a journey for him to fill out a new invention called the Pokédex which is essentially a beastiary of all the different Pokémon you capture during your journey with their stats and what not logged.
While you were walking around the world, you'd find these Pokémon by walking around in tall grass or other such 'wild' areas, battle them with the Pokémon you already owned, capture them when they were weak. Different types of Pokémon (ghost, water, fire, grass, etc.) were generally found in areas that made sense, like haunted houses or rivers or deserts. When your stable was strong enough, go over to the next town's gym and beat up on their local crew to tag the turf for yourself. Once you beat all the crew's, you were the region's Pokémon Master.
This game drops the battling for the most part, and I'm not sure how it handles gyms though it seems there's a little bit of fighting there but more in the vein of the card game than the video game.
But, all the unnecessary preamble aside, you are walking on a cartoon version of your map and the phone is tracking you and randomly popping Pokémon onto the map. You click on them and then it pulls up your camera with a crude 3D model of the Pokémon displayed on screen, so you can imagine you actually found it where you're standing in the real world. You then flick Pokéballs at it over and over because it's really unclear what makes a good throw and what doesn't and eventually you catch the Pokémon. It then gets added to your Pokédex and then you keep walking until you stumble into another one. Like the original game, types of Pokémon are roughly tied to regions, meaning people in different parts of your city are finding different types of Pokémon, adding incentive to go to parks or lakes or the other side of town or whatever. It's a really novel idea that, for me, drops the game part of the game and makes it a little hard to get into as more than a curiosity personally.
There are also hot spot locations marked as either the stores or the gyms where you can buy things (with real money or Pikachu coins) or fight things. But like I said, I can't imagine the fighting is all that much to it but I also haven't got that far yet since all the Go I've been playing is at my apartment so far. But primarily it's just walking around and catching Pokémon when they appear, and while it doesn't seem like that great of a game to me I'm happy to read the stories about obese people who are sucked into it and "accidentally" walking 6 miles a day just to catch Pokémon.
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"This is the streets, and I am the trap." � Jay Bilas
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/archive/contributor/517
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