Have you heard of Pokemon Go yet? If not, you will. Nintendo’s new mobile game has become something of a craze in the handful of countries where it has launched, including the US.

Soon, it will be available here in the UK too, although some crafty souls have figured out how to get it onto their smartphones here already. Me included: this morning, I caught a Pidgeotto, a Magnemite and a Drowzee on my way to work in central London…

But if you’re wondering what Pokemon Go is and whether it’ll be a good idea for your children to be playing it when it does launch here, there are a few things to be aware of.

It’s a location-based, ‘augmented’ reality’ game available for Android and iPhone smartphones as a free download. The game has the same premise as all the past Pokemon games on Nintendo’s various DS devices: explore the world and collect hundreds of cartoon beasties (“Gotta catch ’em all,” as the slogan puts it) while training them up and battling other Pokemon.

The big difference with Pokemon Go, though, is that the world is the real world – the streets, fields and public landmarks of your village, town or city.

To play, you simply fire up the game and walk around until a buzz alerts you to a nearby Pokemon, at which point the screen switches to the camera view of wherever you are, with the Pokemon capering about on top of it (this is what ‘augmented reality’ technology is). You catch it by flicking a Pokeball up from the bottom of the screen.

‘Get up off the sofa and out into the world’

There are other aspects. Some local landmarks, from street-art to pubs, are designated as “PokeStops” where you can collect extra Pokeballs, eggs and other useful items to use in the game. Larger landmarks like churches, meanwhile, are designated as Pokemon Gyms where you can have battles.

There is plenty more to Pokemon Go, but those are the basics: Nintendo and the game’s developer Niantic want the game to get children and adults up off their sofas and out into the world, so there’s a healthy-exercise angle here too.

That’s a good thing, but when Pokemon Go launches here in the UK, there are a few concerns for parents too.

First: the game revolves around players walking around in the real world looking at their smartphones. That’s a bit of a risk: for example, in parts of London there’s an epidemic of moped-crime at the moment, where thieves on scooters zoom up behind pedestrians and swipe their phones.

This happened to me two weeks ago, in fact. Pokemon Go-playing children could become a target for this kind of casual theft, if their eyes and minds are on the game rather than on what’s happening around them.

Second, there are some issues around battery life. Pokemon Go is a real battery-sapper, since it’s using the smartphone’s GPS and camera features. The prospect of their children having a dead phone by the evening if they can’t get to a charger may give some parents collywobbles over safety too.

There have also been privacy concerns about the game, which has two options for logging in: you can sign in with a Google account, or with a Pokemon account. Last night, it emerged that choosing the first of those gave Pokemon Go access to the player’s entire Google account – able to read and send emails from their Gmail, see any photos they had stored in Google Photos, see their Google Maps history and so on.

The developer has said this “full access” was unintentional and is being fixed, however, so by the time Pokemon Go launches in the UK, this should not be a problem.

Finally, as parents it’s worth being aware that Pokemon Go will make its money from in-app purchases of its virtual ‘PokeCoins’ currency: in the US, they can be bought in amounts of up to $99.99 of real money in a single transaction. In my experience so far, the game does not hassle you to make such purchases, though, and it can be played for free quite happily.

‘They’re hopefully responsible enough for a talk’

This may all seem quite negative: a game that could put children at risk of theft; run their batteries down; get access to their personal data; and cost them lots of money through in-app purchases.

The positive side is that it’s very fun, it gets players out and about – if you want to visit the gyms, you really do have to visit their physical locations, so it’s an encouragement to walk – and it’s drawing on a series of games and characters that have many fond memories for a lot of teenagers.

So, rather than suggest that Pokemon Go is not safe for your children, I’ll go for some more practical advice. If they’re old enough to have a smartphone and go out by themselves – if they’re not, they should probably only be playing the game with you on your phone! – then they’re hopefully responsible enough to sit down for a talk about safe usage of it.

In other words, trust them to take the right decisions, from keeping their wits about them when playing the game in public, to watching their battery life, perhaps logging in with a Pokemon account not a Google account, and spending any money in-game carefully if at all.