Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars

Lords Mobile: Kingdom Wars is a Massively Multiplayer RTS game by IGG SINGAPORE PTE. LTD. Once you start the game, you load into a scripted event where you rally against Death Knight and his army. Afterwards you can start work on building up your city. You build up your Barracks to train more soldiers. You can build an Infirmary to heal more troops and upgrade the Manor to increase gold production and other various castle upgrades as you progress. Every action uses time or gems to speed up. A big portion of the gameplay loop is filling out various daily quests as well as managing your finances, armies and food reserves. You collect characters and build up resources. You can do PvP or PvE. The art style is nice. The in-game characters are well designed. The music is well composed and appropriate but rather repetitive. Throughout most of the time playing you'll hear the main theme and map music on loop. You get a few others for other events but it's the same few. To preface this mostly negative feedback; I will say that when I was first getting into the game - I read the reviews and I knew this game would be heavily skewed towards Pay to Win mechanics. I thought I could get by as a F2P player and just spend a little bit each day to do my daily tasks and progress. Something you'd leave on in the background but come back to as you do other things. I refused to use gems (as much as possible) or spend real money. Initially the gameplay loop seemed fun and progress was much faster. It made you feel like actually taking time to upgrade your base and invest time into it. The tasks started off taking a minute, and then 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and eventually you'd come back and you'd be waiting over 24 hours to complete 1 task. Sometimes this would take actual real life days. As you built up levels and your kingdom - before long it became a waiting simulator. I did really enjoy playing, but that was part of the toxic cycle with this game. Lords Mobile has EXTREMELY predatory game practices by a Chinese company (is it even surprising?) The game completely favours whales over actual players. The gameplay loop is brutal and you will pay with your mental health. I actually think it should come with a health warning. The UI is made to make you waste as much time as possible. Constant pop-ups and dings for someone with ADHD like myself it's a complete dopamine sink. The actual gameplay is mostly autobattles and not much tactical movement. Every little click is made to give you bursts of excitement; just enough to get you coming back and spending more. Why wait if you can just buy to get more gems? All the best heroes are blocked behind real money paywalls. Progression is paywalled too. Most of the events are usually based around an impossible goal to complete in time unless you spend money. Smart strategy cannot overcome an opponent with a massive wallet. There is bad inventory management. Too much time is spent going through cluttered item bags and chests. The matchmaking is unfair and with zero safety nets. It forces you to maintain shields 24/7 just to survive. Not to mention the game is rampant with hackers who will scout your city and instantly teleport their entire army the second your shields go down. You're not really progressing anywhere and days are spent building up to see your city go to ruin. Even outside of the PvP aspect it's pre-calculated results and passive viewing. Fancy battle animations hide basic math calculations. This game is genuinely evil. I think it's kind of like selling a part of your soul to commit to this. Worse than doomscrolling. There's a lot of toxicity even within the guilds. This is less a problem with the game and more with the community. After almost 1k hours, and after I took a break from the game. There was a new update and I tried coming back and noticed my account was disabled. I have no idea why and I lost all my progress. Which was a huge loss because I'd amassed a number of items and unlock characters. After I lost my account the company was not interested in helping me regain my loss. The developers have complete disregard for its most loyal playerbase. They only care about the whales which spend thousands into this. Overall, I would highly suggest other players who were considering playing to STAY AWAY from this game. I've never had such a bad relationship with any other franchise. I'm glad I no longer play. If you're interested in other games that have some base-building, guild warfare and RTS elements - consider playing Age of Empires or Total War franchise. [b]0/10[/b]