Games don’t all have to be about winning battles and completing missions on your touchscreen. They can mix up lots of different things; even doing things outside in the real world! Ingress is an Augmented Reality game; an app that need you to go out and complete missions in the real world to increase your score in the game. How amazing does that sound?

First you need to grab the game from the App Store. Ingress will then find out where you live, and show you on a map places where you need to go complete missions. You’ll need to choose a side in the war you’re about to embark on: The Enlightened or The Resistance. Both are fighting over a new energy that has been found. The Enlightened want to use it to change people into new forms, and The Resistance are fighting to keep humanity pure and unchanged. It’s up to you who you choose to fight for, but whoever you side with you’ll be doing a lot of hacking.

The game will show you places of interest on a real map. These can be places like your local part, or a statue, or a fountain. These ‘portals’ are leaking exotic energy, and you need to capture them! Capturing them when they have just been found is easy, but if the enemy has the portal then it’s more difficult to hack.

Ingress is a multiplayer game, so everyone around you may be a friend or enemy. The best way to play is with friends; get a group of you together and go protect your portals every day. Because if you leave your portals for too long, someone could come and take them away! This big too-and-fro means you have to spend a lot of time playing Ingress, but with friends this can be very fun.

Ingress is free to download from the App Store. If you’d rather play something less complicated, try something from our Best Apps channel.