Wow, it’s been 5 years since I got sucked into Game Of War, a pay to win mobile game. Guess what, I’ve been sucked into another. Unknowingly, Rise Of Kingdoms takes the core components from Game Of War, made it visually better, and added many more gameplay aspects to it and I’ve been sucked into the daily grind. I am now 70 days into the game, I’ve played it every day so far on & off and I’m hooked but I feel it’s getting to the point where I either sink hundreds of pounds (nope) or give up.
Rise Of Kingdoms is a free to play, role-playing game, currently ranked No.16 on the UK iTunes chart and it’s receiving ALOT of praise and rightly so, it’s a fun game. Essentially, you great a kingdom and work your way up through the ages, increasing your power, with the goal of being the strongest commander in the kingdom. When setting up, you get to pick a country or army, I went Bristish but there are several to choose from including French, German, Turkish etc. From there on, it’s a matter of gathering resources, building your kingdom, and training troops.
Buildings within your kingdom include your generic resources, troop training, research, alliances, shops, and so on. You can edit the layout of your city at any time and if you purchase (with alliance coins) a city rename, you can swap from say British to French, which has perks associated to it, along with visual changes to your kingdom. As you grow in power, your kingdom grows too and you’re able to build more buildings.
The map, it’s VAST and chances are, you’ll never meet anyone outside of say a 10minute march radius unless you teleport. On the map are all the resources available to harvest, food, wood, stone, gold and gems. These vary in levels, from 1 to 6, 6 offering the highest capacity of resource. Send your troops and wait for their return, with a load of resources. Also on the map are barbarians and other PVE enemies, which you can attack at any time or event-specific but they can become difficult, so make sure you’re power meets the requirements.
You will also see all the other real players on the map, their kingdoms and their alliances. Unless they have a peace shield active, theoretically its fair game and you can attack whoever you so please. That being said, the kingdom I am in has certain rules against rogue fighters and killing is only fair game during Kill vs Kill events. Join an alliance, make some friends and gain a huge benefit from your companions. Gifts, help reducing time on research and building and purchase items from the alliance shop. Each alliance has allies and enemies, they each have their own territories and you must protect and grow together.
This is all very much like Game Of War, apart from a couple of nice additions. One of the biggest additions are commanders, used to fighting and harvesting. You can have as many commanders as you want, you can level them up, make them more powerful or within the ability tree, be smart, go specific i.e so & so will be dedicated for harvesting only, so improve troop capacity and harvest speed etc. Commanders come in rarity, green, blue, purple, and gold. You can unlock them all over time, for free, as part of the grind.
As mentioned before, I’m some 70 days into the game, just over 3.5million in power and still miles behind everyone else. I’ve got people with circa 60million power nearby, which I cannot compete with and I’m getting to the point of no return. Do I sink some big money into this and try keep up? You can buy gems and packs, which offer resource and speed boosts, helping you to increase in power a lot quicker. To date, I’ve bought two packs, one for £4.99 and one for 99p. It helped but it didn’t last long. I dread to think what some have spent getting to these crazy power levels. And that is the problem, this is a pay to win game. If you want to be the best, you got to pay and there will always be someone willing to pay. Also, once you’ve purchased a pack at that price, when that’s gone, the next pack will be more expensive.
I really enjoy the game, I like the grind of trying to keep up with people in my alliance and fighting together, against PVE enemies or in events against other kingdoms. That gap between me and the highest power in the kingdom is growing greatly every day, which sucks. It’s free to play, you’ll start in a kingdom with other noobies, so it’ll start out quite fair and I recommend you try it. Whether you sink money in, well, that’s up to you.
