Author: admin

From the word-salad name you know something is seriously wrong with this game. That thing is that the mechanics are an exact copy of Clash of Clans, down to every number, building and troop type. Well, build times are doubled. But the art and design team did such a great job it’s worth mentioning.

It’s got a semi-steampunk theme. The clan hall is a round-topped greenhouse with wrought-iron for all of the delicate windows. Like all clan halls, it starts off to the side, broken. Weeds grow up the sides and half the windows are shattered. Beautiful. I can’t believe I repaired it before getting a picture. The liquid resource is Steam. It’s kept in fabulous iron-bound glass balls, filling with fluffy clouds of the stuff. Even the decorative peasants walking about your base are more and better than average.

Each building is a floating island in the sky, growing together if they’re not too far apart. The whole base is fully 3D and viewable from any angle. Lovely mountains are in the distance. The rubble is much nicer than usual – an old rusty windmill (on its own floating patch of dirt) a vibrant pool with flowers, the shattered rocks of a destroyed island, and more. Tapping a building creates a dangerous looking sand spill from the bottom (which, as you recall, is floating in the sky). But Clash of Clans still has them beat on building tapping sounds.

The wall drawing team clearly didn’t understand the game. The walls extend equally above and below the ground, with ghastly spikes. It’s just terrific. Except when they’re not at the edge of your base all you see is the stubby top part. Not even the spikes. And guess where the best place to put walls is in a clash-like? Not the edges.

All of the troops have a flying aesthetic. By that I mean they can’t fly over walls, but they can somehow fly up here and fly through any sky between buildings. The wall-breakers are cloth-wing gliders that fly in, bomb a wall, then fly away. The archers are lying down in floating bumper-cars with one mounted gun (they don’t look great). Giants are, obviously, floating robots. The regular grunts have barrels strapped to their backs, with huge arms on the sides. They mimic the two small arm-levers in front – seeing them smash is the cutest thing. It’s the most steam-punky thing in the game.

The new-ish feature that surprised me was a big grid, on an entirely different screen, that you explore with a ship (the same as Plunder Pirates). That’s where you fight computer bases and see the plot. You need to sail around and uncover hide-outs of the evil steam-robot king. The art department did so well. The islands you uncover look just great.

There’s one change from Clash-of-Clans, which you can probably guess: you get a hero much faster. It also levels up as you use it. But it’s not that powerful. On defense it crushes troops that ignore it – goblins and giants – but otherwise dies quickly enough. But you can spend a big pile of gems to buy a better one, or two more labelled as premium heroes. I watched one attack me on a replay. Not as bad as I expected, but definitely violates the informal “you can’t spend cash for a blatant advantage” rule.

The special thing about Fort Stars is how it makes a side-view base work. Usually these are boring single paths. Fort Stars makes it somewhat exciting. But the rest of the game — ug.

Instead of placing defenses in an empty castle, you place rooms. They go in several stacks surrounding your Throne Room. The attacking team of 3 heroes fight their way through. They prefer the bottom, but if lured onto an elevator with one of your “go here” spells, they’ll gladly continue along that level. The Throne Room is a mini-boss. Beating it ends the battle. The heroes have probably gone through 3 rooms out of 15. They haven’t even touched the other side.

Here’s where it gets good. Some of those skipped higher-up rooms held the gold. Oops. Some were “buff” rooms that made the ground-floor monsters tougher, or long-range catapults. But more than that, merely beating the Throne Room is worth only 1 victory star. For the full 3 you need to destroy about 2/3’s of the base (the game shows the count). You’ll need to use that “go here” spell to drag them on a route. Even more fun, the defenders get points for each hero they kill. You have to beat that or you lose. If you go for broke but lose your 2 weaker heroes, aborting back to the Throne Room is no longer an option — you’ll lose 2 to 2.

The fun of the game is pushing your luck to get more gold and stars. Besides the “go here” spell, you can aim the heroes special attacks, and summon various monsters and blasts. But otherwise your heroes just do what they want. Setting up a defense seems interesting — plenty of interesting rooms, a point-limit, and a variety of traps.

The bad stuff comes in 2 parts. Everything in the game advances by collecting cards from chests, mostly from grinding your dailies. There’s a direct correlation between how many days you’ve actively played and your overall level. The second badness is the completely new gameplay in a “crush your neighbors” world map. You have to join a guild and kick lesser guilds out of the choice areas. I’m not sure what that eventually gets you in the regular game, but it must be something.

And now the mandatory aesthetics complaint: the start of the battle shows spectators, cheering your guys as they run past fireworks. The characters are the Stars in a “Fort Stars” sporting event. It seems clumsy – I assume it’s to lower the parental guidance rating.

The tag for “Mad Rocket: Fog of War” is that enemy bases are covered in fog, needing to be slowly revealed. That’s true, but undersells how original this game is. The mechanics are borrowed, but they fit together so well.

Firstly, the ground beneath bases is made from a dozen large tiles which you can arrange. Nothing exists outside of it. If they’re in an H shape then attacking troops need to walk down one leg and back up — they can’t cut across. Invaders are air-dropped inside this area, preferably directly on top of a cannon you want dead. Of course, you won’t know where that is until you clear the fog.

The little pieces of fog clear at the least provocation. Troops remove it as they move. Any spell clears the area underneath — the area-effect missile spell is great for this. If an unlucky drop puts your troops between 3 guns it’s not a waste — the guns are unfogged when they shoot you to death. That might seem too easy, but there’s lots of fog and you’re on the clock. It’s always a choice between clearing fog and guessing. You can even play without fog by using the Scout spell to clear it (which uses up a valuable spell slot, so is fair).

Now we get to the good part. Attacks are completely a race against the clock. You get 4 spells which can be cast over and over. Two are troop squads — regular soldiers and another squad of tough guys. Live or die, you get to place more every 45 seconds. You can cast a big missile swarm every 10 seconds, and a single-target rocket every 2 seconds. That’s just your starting line-up. Besides cool-downs, spells use energy. It regenerates quickly, but if you really need to fire 3 rockets in 6 seconds, some other spell will need to wait a few extra seconds while energy builds back up.

Clearly, keeping your troops alive for as long as possible, which is not very long, is the way to win. Your spells can destroy land-mines and guns, and uncover safe spots for the next group, while the troops shoot up the regular buildings.

Now we come to the really fun part. Every spell, including the airplane dropping your troops, can be shot down by air defenses. The basic air defense has a medium radius and fires like a machine gun. An air defense can easily defend itself against rockets, but it turns out that the tough-guy airplane is also pretty tough and can be used as a distraction. For the second or two it’s in flight it can distract an air defense, allowing another spell to fly in safely. Later you get an attack spell which does about the same thing (shoots up short line doing so-so damage but using a very tough airplane). Much later, you’ll get a unit who’s only job is to hover and distract air defenses. But by then the defenders have more types of air defense.

To give the defender some hope, all spells fly up from the bottom of the screen, which means bases tend to be attacked from the bottom up. A few sneaky people make a long, thin base with the air-defenses all in front, but after practice that just means you can distract and then kill them all-at-once. The best defenses have the attacker always needing to worry about spells being shot down.

The timing is frantic. You get 1 minute, 30 seconds for an attack, but destroying a building gives you a few more seconds. Destroying the HQ removes all fog, which is pretty nice, and gives you a larger boost to time. That system of adding seconds make battles more unpredictable. You can spend the entire last 30 seconds of a battle only seconds away from losing.

You might think the theme is modern military, but it’s science fiction. You’re on an alien planet, mining pretty green Eternium crystals for “The Scientists”. The bad guys are trying to get it before you do. For no reason, your reports are from young women wearing Sexy Scientist Halloween costumes. The troop models are a copy of Boom Beach: white male soldier, black tough-guy soldier, female sniper (actually called Laser Girl in this game. Yuck, especially when “laser ladies” is right there).

First, let me write that I’m sure talented hard-working people worked on Billion Lords. They did a nice job adding all the modern clash-like stuff. It’s such a shame that it’s impossible to attack in this game, making it boring and pointless. It’s far too easy to set up unbeatable defenses. All can you do is sit and safely farm to buy upgrades. Once you do, you can get better troops, which are also impossible to beat anyone with. Your only entertainment is occasionally watching replays of a massively expensive army being wiped out by your defenses.

The game works like the Dungeon Keeper clash-like: you dig out your base with the requirement to connect all buildings and entrances. Those entrances are at the 8 compass directions on the edges. In Dungeon Keeper you can attempt the obvious thing — funnel everyone through a single gauntlet — but the attacker has tricks to avoid that. Not in this game.

Billion Lords has no attacking tricks. Worse, the defender has lots of room. A base can easily have a path circling the entire base several times past every mortar and zapper before hitting the freeze trap (to gather them all) them massive bomb traps, then the -25% weakness trap just in front of where your leader comes out to finish them off. “But what about the 8 entrances?” you may ask. That’s easy — add a giant path in a ring touching them all and give that your one path into the labyrinth. You have plenty of room to do that.

That seems hard to figure out, but it’s a clash-like. After attacking and seeing other people who did it, you’ll figure it out.

There aren’t any flying troops to bypass this maze of death, but there are wall-destroyers. They take about a month to unlock and the description makes it sound as if they’ll borrow straight through. Nope. They’re the usual self-destructing wall bombers. Even that would work if not for for the broken AI. Wall bombers will never walk into a space that started off as a wall. You send in one and it blows open a small space. The next avoids that space, blowing up somewhere off to the side. Useless.

Hilariously, one attacking strategy works. The “wizard” leader, buyable with 1,000 gems, has a special ability that strikes several random buildings, anywhere on the map. Attack with only him. By the time he has circled the base several times he will have used his ability several times, hopefully hitting resource buildings for cash. Then press abort and repeat.

But let’s say you try. You save up and attack people much weaker where you have a chance of winning. It costs Gold to recruit your army. When you attack you might win some of that gold back, but mostly you’re trading Gold for Stone. You don’t need Stone — you already have extra sitting around. What you need is Gold. Attacking people in this game doesn’t even help you.

All-Star Troopers is the first true childrens’ clash-like. The creators have a nice article explaining how it started as something completely different, which makes it even more impressive. All-Star Troopers looks exactly as if someone decided to make a simplified Royal Revolt, with some Clash Royale thrown in.

First off, everyone advances at about the same rate. There’s a limit of 3 loot chests a day, which is where you get most of your progress. You need to win them in battles, but you can keep trying. Eventually you get 3 anyone anyone can win. You don’t get much else past that, and don’t lose much if you have terrible defenses and get beat a lot. Anyone can make the same steady progress in this game. Which is nice for kids.

Bases are pre-made paths to the HQ with pre-set waves of defenders, and 1 big wall midway. In an older game, Royal Revolt, you can create the path and set each wave of defenders from a dozen troop types. In this game — you can move the wall. You also get to place guns and cannons and traps, but it’s simplified. There’s no need to actually build cannons. You always have all you need and can change defenses at any time, using a point system. Upgrades are on a whole class of items at a time, such as “upgrade cannons to level 2”. It’s quick and worry-free.

As with Royal Revolt, you control your leader while supporting troops run in to help. In RR you pre-select which troops you want, and call them in as needed. In this game it’s simply timed generic waves of good guys.

The result is less busywork, and almost no need to plan. Which is fine. The action part is fun enough, vaguely. Your hero is fully controllable and the waves of attacking and defending enemies make it interesting. Even though you use 1 hero at a time, you can instantly switch back-and-forth between 3, giving you 3 special attacks to choose from. There aren’t even that many different heroes to collect.

One feature that really sticks out — whenever you level up enough, you’re moved to a new area. The path is a little longer, the various obstacles move around, and obviously, your guns are gone and need to be placed again. This is their way of giving you longer and longer paths, without you needing you to do any work making them. Defenses are easy enough to place, and don’t really matter, so having to redo them occasionally isn’t a problem.

Finally there’s the theme. Your base is a spaceship floating over the planet (with your defense base on the planet. We’re never told why). The attack/defense minions are bipedal pigs, while the heroes are various human/animal mixes. Kids like that stuff, right?

In Clash-likes it’s fun to have units which do unique things, and healer troops fit right in. But it seems strange how the original, Clash of Clans, has such odd rules for them. In Clash healers are large, flying and only heal ground troops. It turns out that’s great. The thing other games do with healers — having them walk behind your army like priests — that’s no good at all.

There are plenty of games where you have a lot of other things to do besides the tactics of a battle, and your army is just your army. Maybe yours has slightly more cheap infantry and fewer horses, but it’s not all that exciting. But in a clash-like all we have is our army and 1-time attacks. If we have a boring army we have a boring game. We need different armies with all sort of different troops to keep things fresh.

Clash of Clans’ big, flying healers aren’t boring. You can’t park them safely behind the rest of your flying army, since they can’t heal flying troops. But in a ground army your flying healers are the only target for those deadly air defenses. Hmmm… . And since they’re so expensive, using even 1 is a commitment. Healer have their uses — at first in an army with giants. They can be in winning armies. But there are plenty of other good armies where you really wouldn’t want them. They’re an interesting troop that makes you think.

A walking priest-style healer is the opposite which makes them boring. Any army is better with a few walking healers safely in the back. It’s an easy decision and doesn’t take any strategy. Sure when you unlock healers it’s exciting. Your army is going to be so much better with them, and when you try it, it really is. But then healers are just an automatic part of any army. Then don’t add any extra fun to designing an army or to attacking with one.

Some games manage to use this otherwise-boring style of healer well. In the Star Wars clash-like you mostly lose because of time running out. You’ve got lots of slow, tough tank-like units that hardly need a healer. Replacing a few troops with healers makes the time problem even worse. Healers are back to being a special case unit, useful in some clever armies. They make the game more interesting.

Empires&Allies uses healers to solve an old problem, which is how the starting infantry unit always becomes useless later in the game. E&A cleverly solves that by having a mid-game upgrade add a medic to each infantry unit (it will heal anything nearby, not just the infantry it’s with). Now infantry is useful again, and their healer is just great in some armies. But since the medic is attached to the infantry, which likes to get fairly close to the enemy, it’s terrible in other armies. You really have to think.

But all-in-all too many clash-likes don’t get it. Even Rival Kingdoms, innovative in so many other ways, has a healer so useful that it ruins the game. There’s only one viable army.

My favorite thing about Clash of Clans healers is how the flavor text ties it together. It seems impossible to explain why healers are big, flying, and can’t target the ground. But … Angels! As we all know, angels are impressively large, can fly, and it seems likely they can heal. And in Clash flyers are evil — imps and dragons and skeletons in balloons. Angels wouldn’t heal evil things like that. Never underestimate the value of a hand-wavy plausible explanation.

“Plunder Pirates” is a terrific example of an overstuffed Clash-like which beautifully hides staid gameplay. I saw it just after minimalist “Mini Castle” and they make a great contrast. Plunder Pirates adds side-missions, lots of Leaders, 2 unique bonus resources; and good lord did their art department do a great job. Only a crybaby like me would want it also to be fun.

The clash-like part starts as unimproved old-school: no reserve army or training queue means you need to wait 6+ minutes between attacks; traps still need to be hand-reset; and the best attack is the old gold raid which “loses” on purpose. Even worse, your leader does most of the work. But they add 2 fun defenses. The Bunker is a long-range machine-gun which only shoots in a 60-degree arc. It’s fun to try to place well. The Pirate Ship is similar, firing very long range but only straight out from the sides. This game also adds troop specials, for example, a 1-use button to make all pistol pirates shoot 50% faster for 6 seconds. But all-in-all, attack and defense is blah.

Besides requiring Gold or “Grog” (stored in big beer barrels, so cute), upgrades require 2 new things: Battle or Resource points. That sounds promising, but you get them through a busy-work quest system. Each of the 8 quests uses some or all of your 4 quest minions for 3-30 minutes. It’s fun to try and keep your little guys always working, but quickly becomes a 2-hour chore.

The other quest system is the exploration map, which is also tap-and-wait. It takes 5-10 minutes to sail 1 square, and about 1/2-hour to fight a sea monster or enemy fort. The random rewards for exploring include … upgrade materials for your already too strong leaders. Aaarg! It turns out the real point of this very slow mini-game is to frustrate you into paying cash when you realize just how many upgrades you need and how slow you’ll get them here. Oh, and the people sailing the ship? It’s the army you were planning to attack with in the regular game. Bye. Wait 10 more minutes to train new ones.

Other than that, Plunder Pirates is magnificent. You can spin the base view to examine the 3D buildings. There’s an auto-tour button that walks around your town, watching your quest-doers act busy. Your first leader has a unique and fun zip-line animation. Attackers come with cute little boats, paddling to the beach. Your base may have a few islands, no problem — attackers have a swim animation. You can actually see them swimming. Dead buildings shake and collapse, with a cloud of smoke and a cheer.

There’s more. It can rain. Each exploration map map monster is 3D with a unique attack animation (the shark shakes you in its mouth). The simple quest descriptions are funny and are on lovely scrolls. The buildings look great, the water on your base map makes you want to take up scuba diving. The obstacles (which take longer to clear than normal) are brightly colored ocean detritus.

The menu art style is almost too stylish to be in a game. The theme is “things made of paper cut-outs” (note to self: how have I not seen the movie “Isle of Dogs”?) Troop upgrade trees visually look great and have fun bonuses: extra health, +1 range, gain a special ability (yes, Clash’s “Builder bases” did this first, but it’s nice this game noticed and copied).

I feel like the people who were supposed to tune the troops, and who beefed-up the leaders to monetize — I feel like they really failed the great art department here.