You can set the app to play your favorite workout music, and a voice will update you on your mission. From time to time, you'll hear zombies chasing you and you'll need to run a bit faster to avoid them.
Meeting new people through a game is a very new concept, and it helps to increase your social circle and gives you a reason to get out of your house and discover your local area.
Niantic posts daily storyline updates containing passcodes solvable with common cryptographic principles for in-game items. Loads of fun, helps you get gear, and lets you learn a thing or two about classical crypto and encodings.
There's a story of espionage, near-future technology and conspiracy surrounding the game. Mainly told through nianticproject.com and later branched to Google Plus.
Officially sanctioned anomaly events are hosted in cities around the world. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of players gather to try and dominate for their faction.
Check the Ingress event page as well as the Ingress Google+ page for more info.
Ingress is an augmented reality game, so you have to move around the real world to progress in the game, with all that it entails - weather, time of day, city density, etc. The game will follow your movement through your devices' GPS, meaning it works in real time and considers all of the surrounding environment. This makes for a situation that feels all that more real due to traveling in the real-world.
Ingress will get you out and about, walk, bike, drive, swim, float or otherwise. You will notice more of your surroundings, more artwork and interesting places. You will explore areas to find potential new points of interest. It will also get you fitter in the meantime.
This game, or any game with the same concepts, cannot be used without both a data plan and location.
That being said, the game works fine over a wifi connection, which is useful if you can sweet-talk portal owners into giving you the password.
The game requires players to walk around real-life locations using mobile data and GPS for periods of time, which is a massive battery drain. Don't expect to get more than a couple of hours gaming outside from most smartphones.
It's a pain to manage 2000 keys manually without any option of group operation on them. This is not an issue at first, but as the player's key collection adds up, it becomes a lot more difficult to manage.
It's an extremely fun concept, walking around and building up an affinity with local nodes to you. However, the fun comes to an abrupt stop when a wandering high-level player, in one visit, levels your affinity and puts you in a position where you have no hope of affecting their control. The long-term and serious players leave new players with very little recourse. Completely kills the fun. Though if left untended the whole area will be neutral again in around 7 days. There is also a way to gain Experience (AP) off enemy portals.
While being a problem it does appear to be an isolated issue that can be rectified by working in groups. Even when that is not possible there should still be enough density of portals to allow low-level players to achieve higher levels that then can affect most portals.