Clash of Clans 16.137.13

Clash of Clans is one of the most well known tap'em up games. I decided to coin this genre without ever bothering to search online. So as far as I know I am the initiator, although too bad for me that nobody knows my identity.

The obligatory rant

Tap'em Up games are made almost exclusively for the mobile platforms. These are games in which you manage a village, castle, moon base, dragon mountain or other static community. Initially they give off the impression of being some sort of economic strategy games. You have buildings, that extract/produce resources which in turn power up construction and building upgrades. Although the skins may differ, the core mechanism remains the same most of the time. You're always hopeful that this might just be what you're looking for.

The tapping part is usually the harbinger of disappointment. Being free to play, construction times are often very long, costing minutes and even hours. Resources are usually generated faster than this, but since you have nothing to do while waiting for your town hall to complete, developers thought it might be fun to put a halt on resource generation after each batch. This essentially forces you to keep a constant eye at production buildings and spot their 'bubble' when it appears in order to collect and continue extraction. Fun, right? Well this is staple of the freemium game: Makes you wait forever but requires constant caring. Of course, the main idea is to entice you to buy, gems, dragon feathers or whatnot in order to speed up times, and generally be much more efficient.

Efficient at what?

So you can see what my personal opinion is in general of such games. The problem is not in the long waiting times. I can almost forgive the bubble tapping also. But these games have no scope. You never accomplish anything except having some buildings at level 53, or getting a special stone fence instead of the regular one because you actually bought some in-game currency.

Clash of Clans is all of that but comes with an extra layer of gameplay: Armies! Units in CoC are trained just like buildings are upgraded, except that they can be queued (thankfully). These come in a variety of types, from brute warriors to archers, mages, demons and other exotic varieties. Once you gathered enough of them you can go on and attack another player's village. This is done in a civilized manner, of course. You will enter a clan and wage organized war against another clan where you will get a limited time period to attack with your troops.

Troops are deployed in any space that surrounds the attacked village by tapping and holding to spawn as many as you want/have. The strategy part is about deploying them cleverly around defensive buildings. You are the general, and the only one with at least half a brain in CoC warfare. I say that because troops cannot be controlled once deployed, and their attack pattern is very simple: Go towards the closest thing. So you'll often witness your throng of braves being chipped away by canons while they joyfully bash some inert building next to them.

That's also where defense strategy plays its part. Buildings in Clash of Clans can be placed anywhere and re-placed anywhere, at any time (except during attacks). This allows you create intricate defense patterns to attack and corner invading troops. I honestly think this is the most fun aspect of this simple game. Unfortunately, in order to reach it, you will need to spend hours just tapping bubbles and upgrading buildings.

As an overall impression, Clash of Clans looks really nice. It is one of the best polished games on Android. Supercell has done the job. Unfortunately, the game design falls into the freemium pitfall - not much of a game. Although the combat can be fun and strategic, the cons outweigh the pros heavily here.