I’ve been playing Clash Royale from Supercell since it soft launched in a number of geographic markets. Personally I got it from the Hong Kong app store (which is where I live currently, though my main app store account is still back in the US). If you work in video-games or are passionate/serious about making games, you need to play this game now. 1
I’m not going to do a full overview of the game – there’s quite a few detailed reviews. The short story is this game is at its highest level a PVP RTS game, with strong design elements of tower defense games and collectable card games (e.g. Hearthstone). Suffice to say the core gameplay – the PVP battles – are really well designed and addictive. It’s conceptually super easy to understand, yet the RNG of “what’s my next card?” combined with a good initial pool of cards to collect means there’s quite some depth and variety to the gameplay (the proverbial easy to learn, hard to master). 2
My early “negative” feedback from my personal experience so far is the chest unlock timers. The basic loop: after every victory, you are awarded a chest. Unlocking the chest requires a traditional mobile f2p countdown timer – the lowest silver chests take 3 hours, and golden chests take 8 hours. You also only have a total of 4 chest slots, which means after a good 20 minutes into the game (beyond the tutorials) you’ll have probably maxed out all your slots. You can keep playing, but you see this:
This sets up a pretty negative “anti-play” loop – I really want to play more Clash Royale, but this pop-up makes me feel like I’m left with no good choices – I can either wait for hours (literally) to be able to play for 1 more win (and then back to waiting), or spend precious in-game currency 3 to play and lose out on chests.
The alternative, of course, is to spend gems (real money) to instantly unlock these chests. But as a monetization gate this feels very heavy-handed, especially considering the CCG elements (randomized card drop, plus cards can be upgraded by collecting more of the same card, with a steep resource curve) already set up a fairly deep monetization well to draw from. As a player, I would say the obvious solutions are to either increase the number of chest slots or reduce the timers, but either would heavily impact the card acquisition model, so without running that spreadsheet it’s hard to say if these are viable solutions or not.
The above is my primary gripe with the game so far. As it relates to the content acquisition loop, I think it’s easier to fix. I also think the core gameplay is really solid (so I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a top 10-grossing game) and is a great example of where core mobile PVP games could be headed. On this particular note, I read this other blog post and can wholeheartedly recommend it. I think even without fancy interaction paradigms like VR, we are still only scratching the surface of super-immersive core gameplay on mobile, and Clash Royale is a big step in the right direction.
- It’s fairly trivial to create a fresh app store account on some of these soft-launched markets – this should never be a reason why you haven’t played a soft-launched mobile game on iOS. This also applies to the China app store, which I think houses some of the boldest yet conventional (as in brute-force) attempts at migrating core PC genres onto mobile ↩
- CCGs are also by design great for monetization, so no one should be surprised to see the mechanic used more and more broadly in games ↩
- each game costs gold, the higher your rank tier the higher the gold cost to match-make, and these do add up ↩
A nicely-written short review. Hope to see more awesome reviews over here. 🙂 If you want, I can help you out work with my website Spiel Times.
Thanks for mentioning my website’s review as a ‘Detailed’ one. If you want, we can work together as a team.
Let me know brother. And keep up the good work.