As much as my initial reaction to playing casual games is generally a cringing face, I went against my better judgment and decided to give it a go under the guidance of OWC Alan and OWC Dyllon and download Clash of Clans. Hope you got your coffee ready, I sure wish I did.
OK, so at its core, Clash of Clans is a game about building an army RTS style and then deploying those trips on PvE (player vs environment) missions, or PvP (player vs player) and destroying their bases and earning two types of resources. You have your Typical Gold, which is NOT used to hire people from your army, oddly enough. Your secondary resource is purple goo. Yep, you read that right. I half expected that I needed to collect it from sewers and plaster it all over the inside of the Statue of Liberty. Sadly, no. You use it to upgrade some things, build defenses, and hire troops. I’m not sure, maybe it’s me, but as a mercenary, I think I would prefer the gold to a cup of goo.
All right. So I start the game with a third resource, and this games failure point: gems. Green little gems that stop the timers from happening, that is. So, at first, it doesn’t really matter. It takes a few seconds for your action to happen and honestly, sure, that’s really fine. I don’t need instant gratification that badly. However, I nearly uninstalled the game instantly when I started seeing 8-24 hour timers. I brought this up to OWC Dyllon, and he talked about multiple day timers. I severely hope this man is joking.
I’ve heard of “Pay-to-Win” games. But this one seems like it’s a “Pay to spend more than 5 minutes at a time playing” game. It takes me only a few minutes of playing before I run out of things to do till my next round of half to full day timers. I made the MIGHTY mistake of misspending the Gems they give you at the beginning of the game. If I knew it was available, I would have waited and bought a third builder hut instead of speeding up some timers. The third builder hut can ONLY be bought with gems. Almost had a brand new iFrisbee after finding that one out. I really need to get Hammer Tough KXs screen protector.
In terms of content and players, there are plenty of people who apparently can only spend 15 minutes total throughout their day playing video games because there are quite a few people playing this title. The game offers quite a bit in terms of being able to design your town, and gives you the AWESOME ability to move all structures after their built so mistakes are ignored. And redesigns of towns are easily doable, which is actually a really nice feature. Defenses change as you play the game, and you may move to, say, a mortar device, which has a blind spot close to it but can rain down terror and destruction on ground troops so you may want to move that close to your center and then build a wall around it.
What frustrated me the most is that I had to NOT spend my resources. I had TOO much. Only reason I’m low on gold in the above screenshot is because I just upgraded my town hall. If I could speed up the timers with resources as well as gems, I’d actually play this game. I gave it my four-hour commitment as usual, but that’s all this title is getting out of me.
Graphics:
For the genre, this is right where it should be, clean-cut graphics that pop and are visually appealing to a wide audience. Great job to the developers on choosing a great graphic style to make sure that people with no time to play video games flock to their title by the masses.
Gameplay:
ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz…. (No, seriously.) Hard to really get into a game I only play at 4-minute intervals.
Audio:
Fair audio though, I had hoped to hear a little more from combat. I’ve never gotten hit with a cannon ball and not said “ow”. But perhaps that’s why I hire them with purple stuff instead of gold. Perhaps some over dramatic background music to set the… oh right… I’m only in the game for a few minutes…
Innovation:
There is a ton of titles in this genre, and frankly I can think of quite a few better ones. I played this on one of OWC’s refurbished iPads and it was good. For those playing on the iPhone, there are a lot of things going on, so I hope you have the iPhone 5 or 5S’s new larger screen.
Overall:
Time to wash the taste off my thumbs with a real game like Shadow Era (Yes, I’m still playing this) or my newest addiction, Solstice Arena. In fact, I think I’m going to review that one next, so brace for the world’s first SPEED Moba next. If the game had more ways to reduce the timers so I didn’t spend most of the time checking in just to start a new timer, the game would be waaaaay more entertaining. By leaps and bounds even. Now all of that being said, it’s not a BAD game. It just could be greatly improved with some other method of decreasing the timers. However for those casual gamers who play a little here and there? I can understand why this would be an outstanding hit. For those who just need a little gaming in there day while they take a break, give it a go.
Gems
Please give gems
Not understand