You can unlock new arenas like the Barbarian Bowl. And it has clans, which let players band together in groups for some higher purpose. It can add more cards, which makes the game more complicated. To counter that, I expect that Supercell will have a lot of options to expand the game over time. It’s easy to learn and hard to master.īut that simplicity may bore you after a while. It is easy to learn, you play against real people, and you can learn it in just a couple of tutorial sessions. You can play it while waiting in a line for coffee. And the giant is great when you need to pound something.Ĭlash Royale meets a lot of tests of being a pure mobile game. I liked the witch, which can attack or defend, as well as the dragon, an aerial unit that can attack or defend and is not vulnerable to ground units such as knights or goblins. If you’re wondering what units to upgrade, you can just look at your enemy’s deck and find out what they’re playing. If you choose wisely, you’ll outgun the enemy when you toss your units onto the field. You can upgrade units with gems so they become more powerful. There’s strategy in figuring out which units you want to appear in your deck of eight cards. Those gems are the reason that Clash Royale has already hit No. You get better loot, but if you want to speed up the opening time, you have to spend gems, and those gems can either be earned in combat or purchased with real money. But it takes three hours to open a silver one and eight hours for a gold chest. It takes 15 seconds to open a wood chest. But silver or gold chests release better stuff. A small wooden chest usually yields poor loot. I’ve managed to win or lose a number of battles with just a few seconds left, and that’s what makes Clash Royale so exciting.Īfter each battle, you get a reward of a chest. If the game is tied, you go into a sudden death for one minute. And if you take out the king’s fort, you win. If you run out of time, the side that has destroyed more forts wins. The battles can end within three minutes. It’s a “rock-paper-scissors” kind of battle where you have to decide within seconds what to do. Each character has advantages and disadvantages when facing other units on the field of battle. Your fort can fire back, but you have to drop some kind of defense, like a dragon, to counter the giant, which can squish archers and goblins quite easily. Once it gets there, it can do a lot of pounding. If you drop down a giant, it will lumber toward the enemy’s fort at a slow pace. Where the variety comes inĬlash Royale has just a few dozen cards at the moment, but most of them are easily recognizable as characters from Clash of Clans. You play cards and choose from among different ones in a deck, and you have to think offline about what kind of cards you want to get (and in this case, upgrade). It has some similarity to Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, the hugely successful collectible card game from Blizzard. That makes the gameplay repetitive and simple. When you are ready to play a card, you just press down on it and move it to the right part of the screen where you want it to appear. If you don’t have enough, a timer that runs in real time shows you when it will be ready. If you have enough mana to play a card, it shows up in colors. The options for cards to play show up in the bottom of the screen. It has two lanes for combat, in contrast to five for typical MOBA games like League of Legends. You have a slate of characters that you can drop on the field and they start moving slowly toward the enemy’s defenses, which consist of two forts and a main castle. It has a slight loading time at the beginning or end of a match. I haven’t seen a hiccup yet in my battles against real players. For this to function smoothly on mobile requires some huge infrastructure. But the blend itself makes for something uniquely addictive.Ĭlash Royale goes farther than Clash of Clans - which has asynchronous battles, where one online player attacks and an offline player defends - in going to synchronous, real-time combat. Clash Royale is a blend of Clash of Clans, real-time strategy, and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games such as League of Legends. It’s no wonder that Apple gave the game a huge feature position in the app store when it launched on Wednesday. But Clash Royale shows that the company still has huge advantages, even as it remains a relatively small game studio. Its success has spawned a lot of other mobile game startups in Helsinki, and everybody is chasing the company’s success. When SoftBank purchased a controlling stake in the company in June 2015, Supercell was valued at an astonishing $5.5 billion. While other companies have just one or two hits, Supercell has now published four major games without the advantages of being a giant company or using huge brands.
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