Clash of Kings Review - Defend your castle

 Empires fall, hit economic crises, lose territory and then a King arrives, taking the kingdom from dark lows to a prosperous high. These are the Kings that are remembered for generations to come. Here is your chance to take this kingdom from the miseries of post-war and make a strong kingdom. 

Clash of Kings is a strategy massively multiplayer online game developed by ELEX Wireless that centers on the concept of building an empire. Players will lead their army in battles, using military forces to destroy and take over castles. The gameplay has diverse features from building and upgrading structures, collecting resources, training troops, going to war, and conducting research to increase their knowledge.

The game doesn’t require extensive gaming expertise, just a strategic mind, and a problem-solving approach. How strong you build your defense relies on the troop training, infrastructure, and equipment you acquire through gaming or in-app purchases. 

The storyline when added up with the equally engaging animation and graphics creates the environment of a dreadful war. The game starts from an animated flashback in which we see a birds-ey view of a large battle arena. Warriors shoot arrows at a barraged castle wall, eventually breaking the wall and storming the area.

Fast forward to today, there is an expected attack and you need to build the empire back from the chaos, strengthen the defence system and prepare your army. The game lets you start from the basics and then rise up to strategizing and fighting. 

The players build a sawmill, using gold coins. After this, you can start fixing the existing buildings and build new stables, training centres and defence infrastructure. There are certain requirements for specific builds that take the form of Level requirements, as well as the number of construction items available. Building requires resources, and in return provide experience points that increase the level of the player. 

In addition to war infrastructure, you need to build farms to provide for the food requirements of the city. As your troops increase the food runs out faster and you would need more and more farms to fulfil the need. To grow food faster you can speed up the process by using gold coins else wait for the specified grow time for each food item. 

As you complete these pre-set quests of building farms, training centres and increasing the army, you are rewarded with gold. This gold enables players to upgrade the empire by building libraries, colleges and research centres that elevate the value of the empire. Once you reach a stable kingdom milestone you get to “explore the world”. The travel lets the players gain more knights and warriors from other places and acquire donations. 

In addition to the diverse gameplay, the character profile and playing modes make the game furthermore interesting. As you progress through the game, your character profile strengthens. This profile displays the player’s character health, experience level, armour equipment, and combat status that includes wins, losses, kills, and builds. Along with these features, a player can collect Skill Points by completing activities within the game that are allocated to Combat, Develop or support-based skills.

On the flip side, however, the game does have some pay-to-win aspects. The app contains an in-app purchases store, where players are able to buy packages of gold coins within the game for real-life currency. This gold lets the player speed up its food growth and builds which results in more resources thus a higher chance of winning battles and defending the empire. 

Players can sign in to their social media to communicate while playing in real-time. Multiplayer is where this game really shines. There is a large, global community of players who for the most part are friendly and willing to help each other. The game also incorporates a private messaging function, where players can send inbox messages to Alliance leaders when attempting to join an Alliance of other players. The game community unlike most others is not a toxic one where players experience bullying. 

The advertising of in-app purchases can get a little annoying at times as it pops up again and again and covers the entire screen. There are no external ads that are good but the repeated ads that need to be manually closed drive away players. These in-app purchases, however, do not encourage any gambling activities.

The other thing that makes players lose interest is the limited resources available if a player chooses to play free. But to put money into the game might not be a good idea. Some of the players that had invested a lot of time and money into the game were banned on baseless grounds that made them lose their progress and money both. 

The response time and customer services are reported to be terribly slow. The team takes a minimum of 2-3 days to reply to any complaints or queries. Customer care doesn’t facilitate the players which mess the game’s popularity among the gamer community. 

The game in order to gain popularity needs to better its response time and customer facilities. The bans, bugs and queries are neither solved nor responded timely. The team can work on this one issue and increase its audience greatly. 

Clash of Kings is better than its competitors, has a reasonable paywall, fun gameplay, and is free to play. It’s easy to recommend, especially if you are interested in strategy games. A traditional storyline, great graphics, easy gameplay and great character portraits is a recipe for a successful game. A large and engaged global community is icing on the cake.

Ratings: 4.1/5
Pros:

• Great character portraits
• easy-to-play
• Impressive graphics

Cons:

• Untimely response to complaints
• Inefficent customer care and feedback

Screenshots 

Requirements:

CPU: Snapdragon 660 Octa Core 2.2 GHz or equivalent

GPU: Kyro 260 or equivalent

RAM: 4GB

Storage: 557 MB

OS: iOS 9/Android 6.0 and up

Phone: iPhone 8/Samsung Galaxy S10 or equivalent

Notes:

This is a demanding app.

Your phone should have these or equivalent specs to run the app smoothly.

Requirements are predicted and could be bound to change as more data becomes available.

You are encouraged to express your feedback below. 

Please use our resource only as a guideline and if you spot any errors let us know.