Clash Royale Is Our New Mobile Game Addiction

Supercell aren’t exactly strangers when it comes to mobile gaming. Hell, for the past few years they’ve had this booming corner of the market in a chokehold. Although Clash of Clans continues to be the studio’s main money spinner, they’ve had huge successes elsewhere. Using almost exactly the same real-time format, Hay Day and Boom Beach has garnered a mass following between them, still ranked in the App Store’s top-grossing titles.

As if juggling three of world’s most popular mobile games wasn’t enough, Supercell have only gone and released a fourth. It’s bloody good, too.

Instead of churning out yet another Clans reskin, the Finnish studio has actually gone away and put some thought into Clash Royale. Yes, it shares a lot in common with Supercell’s flagship yet feels much more straightforward and rewarding. There’s no base building here, waiting for hours as your clansmen construct an assortment of defencive structures. In fact, Clash Royale does away with the entire settlement system completely.

Instead, Supercell have distilled Clash of Clans’ combat gameplay, extracting its fiery competitive core before hammering it into something much more condensed.

It takes a matter of seconds to dive straight into an online game. Matches are strictly a one-on-one affair with players positioned at opposite ends of a miniature battlefield as they seek to destroy each other’s towers. Aligned in a triangular formation are two small towers then a main base. Naturally, when its health bar reaches zero it’s game over.

However, with matches only lasting a couple of minutes, there will be times where both base towers are left intact. When this happens, Royale tallies the number of outposts destroyed to find a winner.

In their quest to rain havoc upon their foes, players have a growing selection of units at their disposal, many of them based on familiar Clash archetypes. The way in which these units are summoned can be likened to a trading card game.

Players can carry a maximum of four cards in their hand at any time, consuming resources in order to trigger their effects. Where most are used in summoning characters to the field, others will unleash area attacks or construct barracks from which a torrent of troops will spawn.

The key to winning at Clash Royale is being able to overwhelm the enemy while repelling their own attempts to sunder your towers. Every card has its own nuance that can be leveraged in a fight to come out on top. Giants, for instance, have massive health bars and a penchant for pummeling towers. Meanwhile Valkyries can be deployed in order to wipe out groups of weaker enemies with her area attack.

The rate at which new cards become available gives players ample time to learn their in and outs. Of course, having the strongest deck doesn’t always mean you’ll win. Timing and positioning are important factors. Place a weak unit too close to an attacker and, chances are, they’ll get spawn killed.

For each game you win, you’ll unlock chests, experience, and crowns, all working in tandem to create Royale’s rewarding progression system. Although they come at a steady pace, chests need to be opened in real-time with the least valuable taking a whole three hours to unlock.

This is where Clash Royale is its most devious. Given the brevity of matches, it’s incredibly easy to gain momentum. Therefore, when you reach that point where you desperately need to upgrade your cards, there are two options: waiting for chests to pop or ponying up premium currency.

The deeper you immerse yourself, the more common this scenario becomes. Although the asking price for a bag of gems may seem generous to begin with, this will no doubt scale as you eventually climb the ladder from one rank to the rank.

Still, for now Clash Royale continues to draw me back to my iPad whenever I have a few spare minutes to kill. Like snack food, it’s fast, addictive, and already destined to make Supercell a huge wad of money.

Clash Royale has clearly caught on since its launch a fortnight ago. It isn’t every week that I’m able to discussion the latest in mobile gaming with other staff members at TheSixthAxis, yet this proved to be one exception as Dave swooped in with his own thoughts:

So far my time with Clash Royale has mostly been of great joy, a short PVP experience that I can have done within five minutes per match, however the further I got into the game I found that the random element of unlocks from chests has cost me. In my experience, not having a certain card has hampered my progress as some cards are objectively better than others.

That said I’ve progressed through a few ranks, unlocking some more tools as I advanced through each tier. When a strategy has outstayed its welcome, I can simply change my tactics and try again with relative ease. While I’ve struggled at times when people who have clearly spent money annihilate my towers with little effort, I felt that when things are more even that when a match is close, it was worth my time.

Overall, while Clash Royale’s business model is questionable, the simplified RTS core gameplay loop is addictive to the point where I’ve set time aside to play the game. This is the first time I’ve really felt a free-to-play game grab me in such a way since Hearthstone and I somehow don’t mind at all.

Like Dave, Kris has also fallen prey to Supercell’s latest money-printing machine:

I think the thing about Clash Royale is that it’s deeper than it looks at first glance. Card battlers, which really is all Royale is when you strip it back to the core mechanics, tend to be either welcoming or terrifyingly complex, and Royale does a good job of welcoming you to the fold.

Where it shines is in its match up system. This is similar to the original Clash of Clans in many ways, with particular units having an affinity for each other. Dragons, for example, are inextricably drawn towards the knight, even if the knight can’t fight back. Knowledge of these relationships is where Royale’s tactical depth comes from.

You’ll work out some things quickly enough, like nothing distracts the giant from smashing buildings except other buildings, but building good counters for some cards will take you a long time, and you’ll likely find yourself struggling for some time until you unlock just the right new toy to give you the edge.

Even so, certain cards seem overpowered, like the charging Prince or the skeleton spawning witch, which seems like it’s part of the game’s free-to-play strategy. New cards are regularly gifted to you by the game, but a card shop also offers you the opportunity to spend soft currency on one of three cards that rotate daily. Don’t have that Epic card you need to push on? Maybe the shop has it, if you’re willing to part with some gold.

Ultimately it’s daily mechanics like this that build out Royale’s lifespan, keeping you coming back every time a new chest opens to shower you with new cards and more gold. The gameplay is satisfying, but not half as satisfying as finally getting that new card you’ve been pining after for days.

Fancy give Clash Royale a try yourself? Be sure to join our community clan by searching “TheSixthAxis” for a helping hand and friendly matches.