Clash Royale is my latest addiction. It is so good, despite its somehow greedy f2p mechanics. The gameplay is pretty simple, you face another player and both have each 3 towers. You must destroy the towers by deploying troops and each game is 3 minutes long (with 1 minute overtime if tied). This is all very simple in concept, but sort of like Blizzard games this is extremely deep and strategic despite it's simple approach.
There is the deck building element of which you select your troops you are going to use (8 troops are selected per deck) and as you get more rewards and advance you discover more troops and eventually get to level them up as you acquire more copies of them. This is where the F2P element kicks in, each reward chest takes 3 hours to open (up to 24 hours depending on the size of it) and you can pay with gems (which are available through microtransactions) to open them faster. So yes if you spend thousands of dollars, you will progress faster than other players. But fortunately this is a game of skill and you simply cannot win with having maxed troops, you really need to know how to play them well.
The pacing, the positioning and the countering of other troops is essential for winning. Minion Hordes (5 elixir) can kill a tower in a few seconds, but they die to arrows (3 elixir) in one shot. This is the concept of elixir advantage, and one of the keys to winning. Counter your opponents troop by spending less than him, and then unleash yours when he's out of elixir to counter quick enough. Most of this strategy involves using Prince or Hog Rider for a quick tower takedown. But there are many other types of decks like beatdown and siege, and each type of deck is usually good vs some and bad vs others. There is a nice balance between each and the devs are constantly making balance changes to the troops so that nothing is really overpowered. Games are short, but it can actually be stressful as each mistake can easily cost you the game as you raise in rankings.
While some players can spend huge amounts of dollars to get the cards faster, I rarely face anyone on the ladder with relatively stronger troops than mine. I never really get this feeling of huh this is unfair, he's so much stronger than me. I managed to reach Arena 7 tier, which is the highest arena tier outside of the legendary one. I haven't spent any money on the game to reach there, so there isn't really any paywall at this point. But to get there it does require so much practice and perfection in your gameplay, also understand your deck and how to counter everything well is massively important. You can only stack 4 reward chests so some players might be stopping playing while waiting for them to open, but you can still continue playing to raise your arena tier as your future chests will have higher rewards in them. I have found myself guilty of this, and sometimes I get lost and play for hours just to grind out the next arena tier.
It is a phone game and it is intended to play in short doses here and there, but I liked how they still allowed you to play as much as you like with some benefit to it. Like mentioned above the F2P mechanics aren't stopping you from advancing (unlike so many complaints you will see on the internet about this game), it's usually the lack of skill that stops you from progressing. Clash of Clans revolutionized mobile gaming and created hundreds of copycats, but I think that Supercell outdid themselves on this one with its purely addicting gameplay. Bare any surprises, this will probably end up being my favorite game of the year or at least close to the very top.
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it’s so frustrating because the gameplay itself at its core is quite well designed and fun but then they just throw in a ton of p2w mechanics and ruin the whole experience
on the whole its not that bad in terms of being p2w i feel only recently its become a bit worse w evolution shit but apart from that its really not bad at all
New updates have kind of turned me off from the game but the dagger duchess and void spell look interesting enough to get me to play again... I just don't like the way evolutions were implemented.
it’s so frustrating because the gameplay itself at its core is quite well designed and fun but then they just throw in a ton of p2w mechanics and ruin the whole experience [2]