Clash of Clans!!

It's been almost a whole year since my last post, and the weird thing is that there are still a ton of people visiting my blog. Sooooooooo, i decided to add another post, to celebrate the new year as well as giving a review of one of my most favorite games on my handheld, which is CLASH OF CLANS!!!!

Clash of Clans!!

Clash of clans is an online strategy game, where you can battle against a computer or another player. This game is made for handhelds and tablets, and fortunately unlike most handheld online games, clash of clans does not have any energy limitations.

Clash of Clans to me, is basically an online version of AoE (Age of Empires_. For those of you who remember playing age of empires as a kid, you will remember that the game consists of tiny men building a city, from the buildings to weapons and warriors. In AoE and CoC, we have to level up the building and defenses so that we can create more soldiers and have better defense against enemy attacks.  And also like AoE in CoC, we can battle againts other cities with their defenses and their armies, and when we don't feel like PVP we can just go against the computer to gain supplies. Oh yeah, there are supplies in this game, but unlike AoE where the supplies are Wood, Gold, Stone, and Food, in CoC there are Gold, Elixir and Dark. Another 

The big difference here is that Clash of Clans doesn't employ the tired energy limitations that define so many other freemium games. Instead, advancement depends on the gold and elixir stores you amass through mines you place throughout your encampments, which has the welcome effect of rewarding effort and dedication rather than slamming a door in your face the moment the gameplay gets interesting.

The problem, of course, is that the system ultimately has the same effect as an energy bar. Get too far ahead in the game, and quests will start requiring insane amounts of gold or elixir that sometimes take entire days to amass. Even worse, some of these simply involve removing a piece of debris from your playing field. Ultimately the point is to get you to break down and purchase some premium currency to speed up the process (once you run out of the free stash you get at the beginning), but the modified design reminds us that we're probably stuck with the energy bar for the time being.

Thankfully, this doesn't mean that you're stuck waiting for quests to complete--you can always go out and attack either NPC goblins in single player maps or battle other players on their own territory. It's a fine compromise that allows inexperienced players to practice against easier challenges and hardcore players to test their mettle against a living, thinking person. Deploying troops is usually just a case of tapping on various spots on your screen and letting them do the rest of the work, but there's some strategy involved in the actual placement.

It's fun stuff, for the most part, but it's hampered by the fact that you can't see the entire battlefield until you've deployed all your troops, and that you lose all your troops whether you win or lose.

Clash of Clans is thus a simple game, but that's more of a strength than a weakness. It's simple enough to provide quick, painless matches on an iPhone in an idle moment, and there are enough different units to choose from in the battle mode to make playing against other players endlessly rewarding. Best of all, the option to fight against NPC goblins gives Clash of Clans a small edge over similar strategy games that rely almost entirely on player-versus-player combat.