Pokemon GO has extensively used in-game events to spice up the playerbase or showcase a new pokemon, and for the most part they’ve been very well received. But the recent Colossal Discovery, heralding the return of the Regis and the arrival of their overlord Regigigas, received a tepid response from the community at best due to being a premium event. You had to shell out $7.99 if you wanted to experience the event spawns, complete event researches, and catch the early-access Regigigas at the end. Was it worth it?

Normally I eschew these sorts of premium events on principal, but I was on Cloud Nine today because the company I’d been interviewing with called me up and offered me a fulltime job as a video editor, which is basically my dream job and I still can’t believe I’ve actually broken into my favorite career path! Anyway, to burn off that energy I gave Niantic their money and hiked into town to see what all the fuss was about.

The first thing that happened was a shiny Groudon popped out of the weekly research, though that had nothing to do with the premium event. Good riddance, flower-crown Eevee!

I’ve recently moved to a city with a ton of active Pokemon GO players, so I had no trouble locating raids for the early part of each stage. However, I am well aware that I would have been badly stymied in my old hometown had I tried to play such a raid-oriented event in a rural area. If you don’t have a few friends to play with, don’t bother because you’ll need at least a few high-level players to beat the Regi raids. Though I do appreciate how the raids respawned rapidly and for 15 minutes at a time. This felt a lot more fun than the slow, 45-minute standard raids because it let me choose whether I wanted to rapidly blitz through raids or take my time and tag the easy ones. I’m not the only one who thinks raids should be like this indefinitely going forward.

Every stage had the same boring quests. If you didn’t finish this weekend, the quests have now updated to non-Regi alternates but with significantly larger requirements needed.

For me, the hardest part of the challenges was evolving 7 Pokemon of a certain Regi type every stage. Sure, there was practically nothing but Rock, Steel and Ice-type Pokemon spawning, but each one requires 25 candies to evolve and that takes a decently long time. Even with pinaps and 11 Regi raids under my belt, I ended the event having only managed to reach the second of four stages, and the evolution quests were the main reason. Veteran players likely have enough candies saved up to not care, but newer players (and ones like me who instantly evolve any Pokemon to get 500 more XP) may find that particular requirement considerably slows down their pacing.

New players will also be excited at the fully-evolved rares they’ll get at different stages of the quests. Veterans, on the other hand, will almost certainly have a few already.

The new Regis are actually making waves in the competitive circuit due to their new fast move, Lock On, which only deals 1 damage but generates 20 energy per tick. This translates to a Pokemon that can pump out Charge moves, which is terrifying in PvP where Protect Shields are limited. Regigigas himself is the only Regi who didn’t get it, probably because combining it with his signature move Giga Impact would lead to him being the first meta-relevant Normal type in the game.

I never get Ex Raid passes (received my last one all the way back with Deoxys Normal), so it’s nice to not have to worry about that for one cycle.

So, in hindsight, do I recommend this event? Honestly, probably not unless you have enough extenuating circumstances to make it worth it. Do you live somewhere that you’ll be able to use all ten freemium raid passes? Do you have terrible luck with getting Ex Raids like me? Do you want to use the exclusive pose that I honestly think looks pretty stilted? Could you use a free Unove stone because your 7-day research rewards won’t play ball? Do you want to shiny hunt the everloving hell out of Skarmories? (because holy god were there a lot of Skarmories…) If you said yes to the majority of these questions, then yeah, it was probably worth it. Me, I think I overall had eight bucks of fun, but I’m not sure if I’ll be buying the next one.

And all those rare candies were absolutely worth the price of admission. I maxed out my worm ghost and got Mewtwo a second charge move!