Thoughts
I've now played Ingress for 4 consecutive days, and I think I understand the game. It's fun but a little disappointing.
It doesn't have a competitive aspect, there's no leaderboard, there's no way to win or lose. There's also no impetus to play, no time pressure, no motivation to change my routine. There's very little substantial you can do to change the game-world. There's very very little strategy or skill.
It's most similar to an idle clicker. You want the number (your experience points, AM), to go up. Visiting, hacking, and claiming portals does that. I have nothing against clicker games, but it's not what I was expecting. I'd heard it described as 'more complicated than Pokemon Go' and 'confusing for beginners' and assumed that was because it had hidden depths of complex strategy. Now, full disclosure, I don't understand every aspect of the game. I've linked portals, but I don't know what linking portals does. So if there was strategy I wouldn't know it, and there are a lot of parts, so that strategy might be very complex. But the goal of the strategy has to just be about maximizing your AM per XM. (XM is a currency/energy. You use it do actions and get it from walking around.) And it has to be completely dominated by play time. As far as I can imagine.
What I was hoping for was time-sensitive quests involving specific real-world locations that required collaboration with other team members and a winner. (As simple as "this portal 5 miles from you is up for contention. It will be claimed by whatever team has more unique agents visit in the next 24 hours.") It seems like a missed opportunity to not have that.
I'm going to continue playing Ingress (and repeatedly hacking the same 20 portals around me that I've claimed), and I'll keep my eyes open for more cool mechanics.