CRASH! Your meager troops are quickly overwhelmed and you get 3 crowned. The music that follows is ironic and you suddenly have the urge to destroy your device. It’s one of the few games that gives players a sense of dread as they open the game. Maybe it will be different this time, you think. Maybe I won’t go up against another maxed player, you halfheartedly assume. You enter the match, dreading what you will see. Surprise. It’s a level 12. Your opponent quickly crushes you with their high level legendaries. No matter how well you play, it seems you will always be blown out of the competition by the players that spend hundreds of dollars. The best players are the ones that pay the most. This game’s motto seems to be “no pay, no gain.” Clash Royale, the game that’s sole goal is to generate revenue, and not fun.

  The controls are simple enough you drag and drop the cards onto the arena to deploy them, where they pop to life and battle your opponent. It’s a mobile game, and to get any real progress you’ll have to grind for hours, or do what the game wants you to do: spend hundreds. Five dollars here and there may not seem like much, but because the majority of the players are children and they have no source of income, soon it’ll soon take its toll and like the rest, they’ll fall behind the competition, as if they’ve never spent a buck on it in the first place. Tournaments and challenges aren’t fair, as any player can tell you from personal experience. Usually, you’ll go up against someone in legendary arena, the highest area in the game. Compared to them, you’re weak, pathetic, and unskilled because they’ve been playing longer than you, and have likely payed more than you. This isn’t your fault, it’s the games broken matchmaking. You’ll usually look up at your opponent, from at least 1 or up to 7 arenas down. The chance of facing someone of equal skill is infinitesimal. You can literally buy anything, from cards to any sort of ingame currency. Progressing free to play is like pushing a boulder up a mountain, eventually it’s going to roll down and crush you, like the “game” does with your spirit.

    The game has a low rating of 2.3 on Common Sense Media which is a non-profit organization that provides online reviews. Many adults and children announce that it is rage inducing. The adults mainly claim that it is mainly “designed to suck money from you.” One of the reviews goes as far as to say, “Forced to spend or sink.” According to geek.com, Clash Royale is a game “its own developer doesn’t want you to play.” It lists some trivial things, such as how long it takes to open a chest. Chests are the only way to progress in the game, and the silver chest which gives nearly nothing, but takes 3 hours to unlock. The review from geek.com praises the gameplay, but declares that the game itself isn’t worth playing, stating that “you’ll spend most of your time not playing the game [and] waiting for your timers to count down.” According to metacritic, only 42% of the players feel satisfied with the game, with 21% having mixed feelings and an astonishing 36% feeling unsatisfied. That’s 57% of the players not feeling satisfied. 

    Loads of players say that after a while of playing the game, you’ll hit a pay wall where you’ll be forced to cash out to advance. Of course you can ignore it, but playing on won’t be any fun. At least in the beginning, it’s quite easy and joyful, but it ends soon. You’ll hastily get crushed by an onslaught of overpowered troops, struggling to counter everything. Pushing to higher arenas will give you a feeling of accomplishment, so you’ll feel proud, and want to do it again. If you pay up like the game wants you to do, you’ll get that feeling pretty often. However, if you don’t. . . let’s just say playing the game starts to feel like a chore. You will no longer feel exhilarated while gaming, instead you’ll be bored out of your mind. And when you finally reach that new arena, you won’t feel that happy burst of accomplishment. Rather you’ll feel flat and quite dull. Soon, you’ll realize it’s a waste of time and will regret playing in the first place.

    Essentially, Clash Royale is a terrible game that should not be downloaded. Though the gameplay is decent, the way the game is presented makes it a pay to win. Many players like me have suffered through this terrible ordeal to finally come to this conclusion. You should not play the app unless you enjoy getting money or happiness sucked out of you. (It’s one or the other) If you don’t want any of these things taken away, I suggest you never download this sorry excuse of a game.