War Reign is a nicely done Boom Beach-style clash-like. Besides some new ideas, it has 3 fully different races; elves, humans, and undead; completely different buildings, troops, spells and leaders. No one does that. The StarWars clash-like has 2 sides, but it pretty much had to. But 3?

Each race gets one passive defensive building. For undead it’s a pustule that explodes when destroyed. The humans’ is simply very, very tough. The elves’ heals other buildings. For traps, humans do damage, undeads do a percentage of the defender’s health, and elves also slow you (I think). The undead mortar does less damage but creates nasty grubs that love to chew on tough guys. Humans get a slow, hard-hitting cannon; the elves version is machinegun-like thorns; undead instead have an “Eye of Mordor” which slowly ramps up damage on 1 target until it dies.

Undead troops include cheap skeletons and wraiths that gain power as skeletons die. The first offensive undead spell summons more skeletons, while the second allows troops to heal by doing damage. If you want a healer unit or a blast spell, play humans or elves. Elves have the game’s only haste spell. Likewise the undead leaders can summon skeletons and heal through damage. Human leaders aren’t so odd, but have the only area-of-effect attack.

A problem with all this racial variety is the small troop selection for each. I have just 4 troops types unlocked and only use 2. It appears you can separately play as each race, but that seems like a lot of work.

A really clever feature is defensive spells for the now common “defend” mode. Undead have one to weaken attackers, toughen buildings, summon skeletons, and lure nearby invaders to one building. It works great, they recharge as invaders die, turning defending into a much more active game.

You win by killing the HQ – every other building instantly explodes. Attacks come from one side, so the HQ is usually at the rear. At first you can use the Beacon spell to run around for an easy win. But once everyone knows what they’re doing, defenses are extremely tough. And you can’t find easier people to fight — the game presents 5 players a day, at about your level. There’s a prize for 5 wins. That takes me about a week. Mitigating the impossibility of winning is that losers get to keep anything they steal. There’s a special item you only get from attacking other players, which is the main reason to beat your head against that wall (metaphorically – the game has no wall defenses).

The area with computer bases has the same difficulty problem. Boom Beach style, they become more and more difficult. Fine at first, but ramps up fast. Some of them look like misprints — huge interlocking fields of guns larger than you’ve ever seen. If you somehow power through, you need to beat stages 2 and 3 without replacing any of your losses.

Most of that isn’t necessarily bad. It’s a tough game, and there are plenty of attack plans and fast thinking spell use that might beat an impossible opponent.

Lastly, this game is from “SmileGate Megaport”. That doesn’t sound right, but it’s a South Korean computer game company and that’s their real name.

Clash of Glory: Mech War isn’t a great game. You know that from the name. But it’s strange enough to be interesting.

There are no troops. All you have a small preset group of mechs, unlocking another every level or two. Attacks use this same 3 or 4, every time. The first is the only hand-to-hand one. But it’s not especially tough and dies quickly. A usual, the main danger is the enemy’s defending mechs (which are the same as yours).

Damage to your robots sticks around after each battle. They heal 1-at-a-time in their building. There isn’t even a queue — you need to come back an hour later and manually begin repairs on the next. But it’s not that bad since being injured doesn’t stop them from attacking again.

The hand-to-hand mech is your “leader”. I think you’re suppose to spend forever upgrading its levels before doing anything else. Maybe that makes it tough enough. It has 2 weak spells — a brief 10% buff to attack. Yay! There are 10 more but they need gems to unlock. I think you can make your original spells useful by using more gems. A weird rule is the leader can’t attack when it’s injured. But it gets to heal in it’s personal hero-house.

You normal mechs don’t have as much room to upgrade, but they can get 3 pieces of equipment in a funny tournament. A new map with 2 special bases pops up for a single day. You and other players are supposed to fight back-and-forth over them. At the end you get equipment based on how long they were occupied and how many times they were retaken. I had trouble beating it the first time. Luckily, I never met anyone else there.

Then there’s other little bits of weirdness. You get a list of attackable people, which doesn’t seem to change on its own. I attacked one guy several times a day. To build a Clan Castle to join a clan, you need “book pages”. I couldn’t even find out how to get those things.

Giants are the first place where you realize Clash-likes are puzzles. Your first troops are warriors and archers. Those work well as a team. Next come goblins. They have no role in your warrior/archer army, but aren’t supposed to. Goblins are for the alternate “steal more, kill less” strategy. So goblins make sense. Then come giants.

It seems you’re meant to replace 5 warriors with 1 giant. The warrior’s job is to stand in front, sucking up damage. They did that pretty well until the defenders got area of effect mortars. That’s where giants come in. They’re basically mortar-resistant mega-warriors.

But then you notice giants target defensive buildings, which is not helpful. When you try to attack a bunch of gold mines, your giants walk sideways towards a cannon, exposing some of your archers. Possibly worse, giants can walk too deep into enemy territory, needlessly getting shot to ribbons. Defense-targeting is not a helpful ability for your attack strategy. Giants are also slow. Not a little slow; slow-slow. The archers can get ahead of them. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to blindly swap giants for warriors.

After a while, you figure maybe you’re meant to take advantage of giants’ new defense targeting skills. A mass of giants could take out only the cannons, making the area safe for archers. But there’s another problem. Not only are giants slow, they do very low damage. Their toughness makes up for it, but the slowness runs out the clock on your attack. Another problem, giants move to the currently nearest defense, sometimes making a zig-zag path through. When the skip even one cannon, your archers are in trouble.

It’s not that giants are bad. It’s that they don’t have any one thing they’re meant for. You’ve got several clunky attack strategies to choose from. That’s the point. A game that told you which army to make would be boring. Or at least the army part would be.

Almost to mock us, the game eventually hands out the perfect meat-shield. But the Pekka costs a massive 25 warriors. Now it’s too tough and expensive for what we need. Plus, by that point in the game we’re beyond that attack plan. It’s yet another unit that is probably useful, but has no one obvious purpose. That’s what makes the game fun.

“Pixel Starships” from about 2016 is a slug-a-thon between fully customizable space ships. You’ll mostly be designing your ship with however many lasers and missiles and such. It has a small clash-like component — builders, generating gold and energy, stealing, upgradable vaults — but the game is old-style 1-on-1 spaceship battles.

Star Squad seems to be inspired by that, but is more clashy. You get a limited amount of rooms, unlocking in clash-like Town Hall style, with plenty of space to arrange them on your spaceship. You have an even more limited number of crew, and only they can fire weapons. Suppose you have 2 lasers rooms and 1 crew. One laser can fire. But when it’s destroyed, the crew member walks to the other. That’s more interesting than it sounds since missiles have an area effect. Fighting another player is still just a 1-on-1 spaceship battle, but it’s more active.

It borrowed the map idea from Boom Beach, as so many other games did. You upgrade a radar, which allows you to see more spaces around you, which have more and stronger enemies and special stuff. They did a nice job copying the computer bases. These are allowed to completely break the rules, since it’s fun. One of my favorites computer ships has only weak lasers and 2 crew to fire them, but there are 12 laser rooms. Every time you blow up a laser, you get a break as she walks to the next. If you can arrange it, a very long walk.

In WarHammer 40K: Drop Assault, I look forward to watching the Ads.

If you haven’t had the pleasure, in the last year it became possible to put 30-second watchable video Ads on a mobile game. By possible I mean it’s now simple for a game-maker to get paid for them. Several services do all the work of contacting advertisers, handling the money and giving you a few simple commands to play Ads in your game. They even check whether the entire thing plays. It’s a real Ad, too – takes over your screen and can even show a “Download now” App Store button.

These days, a completely free game doesn’t need to sell you anything. It can play an Ad every 30 seconds or make you watch one before every round. Even higher quality freemium games often have you watch an Ad to get the daily bonus, or use “you’re out of energy – watch an Ad for more?” It’s all pretty clumsy.

Clash-like WH40K:DA does Ads brilliantly. It has: limited Ads, two clever ways to use them, lets you decide whether it’s worth it, and puts them in a place they make sense.

Ad method one is to reduce a build time. This is great since it’s rare and can’t be abused. You can watch 1 Ad/building and the reduction is a percent of the total build time. For a 15-minute build time you can watch 1 Ad to reduce it by 2 minutes. For a 16-hour build it’s 2 hours. The genius is how usually there’s no point, so it doesn’t feel mandatory. But rarely you open the game, see your long build is close to done and spending 30 seconds to finish it off seems like a good deal.

The other way to watch an Ad is to get 50% more stuff after winning a battle. This is extra-genius. You’re in a good mood after a win plus you could use a 30-second break. You feel like you earned the Ad. It doesn’t feel like a task because there’s a limit. You want to save the Ads for the bases with really big pay-offs. Even if you make only 1 attack you can look at how much you got and decide if 50% more is worth it (the game is still a clash-like – many bases have no loot and you just wanted to clear it off your map).

There is one more thing to use Ads for – the thing everyone does. On the world map you can watch an Ad once/day to get gems. That’s boring, but limited Ads still makes it a little interesting. Maybe you have 3 big attacks you want to increase, but you also want the gems – oh, the dilemma.

Star Squad Heroes uses the same Ad-after-a-battle trick, but it’s for a bonus chest, which isn’t the same at all. You just need to quickly win any three battles to get them all. The fun part, which is gone, is deciding how to spend your Ads.

A funny thing is that we had Ads in free games, back on the internet. Then they want away with mobile games — we didn’t know how to add them. And now they’re here again. Way back in 2000 free browser game ArchAge had a stat called “Luck”, which you gained by clicking on Ad links. They were just banners to read; I think the page got a few pennies per click, but it felt very much the same.

I enjoy Clash of Zombies for its incoherence. Clearly it has a zombie theme. It’s also science fiction — your base is a crashed spaceship which the upgrades are repairing. It also has comic book superheroes. If you’re looking for the eloquent way they combine, you can stop. Mechanics-wise, you might assume it’s a boring clone, but it tries some new things, including a new idea for monetizing.

As for the zombie theme, your 3rd resource is Survivors. The generator is a radio tower calling people fleeing from zombies to come towards your camp. That’s cool, but it means you’ll later be spending humans. In the mini-game where you defend your base, the computer attackers are zombies. You can capture some of them for 1-time use later. That’s the only way to use zombies in your attacks. Out of all the heroes, only 5 are zombies. Except 1 is really a mutant from Resident Evil, another is Stitches the blobby hulk from World of Warcraft, and the last is zombie president Trump. The cut-scene at the start shows a base being overrun with zombies and tells you to rescue some guy from it. I never saw anything more about that.

Sci-Fi-wise, the whole base is futuristic. Defenses are blasters and lasers. One troop have an energy blade and one is a robot. The dragon is a huge anti-grav pod.

Idea-wise, it’s a mixed bag. Some seem pointless. “Arena” mode has you attack one base it picks, for Arena points. They give weekly prizes. I don’t think that adds much to the game. You can attack a computer base where the HQ has about ten million health, using all your heroes but no troops, and the damage you inflict stays. There’s a second defense mode where you’re attacked by only heroes, not troops. Nothing wrong those things, but they’re not all that fun.

As for good ideas, defense mode allows you to assign builders to repair buildings under attack. It’s somewhat fun, it gives you something to do while you watch.

The defensive buildings have customizations, unique to each type: a stun chance, damage over time, power-up nearby defenses, and so on. That’s some nice extra effort. But they can only be bought with special currency which can only be bought with cash. That’s pretty much the worst thing to do in a Freemium game — a big, obvious “I bought this and am better than you”.

I suppose once you have superman fighting zombies on an alien planet in the year 2300, you’re not expecting the rest of the game to be a well-crafted masterpiece.