Gather your troops and pillage, burn, and "bully" your opponents (for a sum!) I still remember playing Age of Empires II on PC. Those were the good old days when online multiplayer was still in its nascent stages and playing over a local area network was a huge thing. Of course, you could only select a few units at the same time and the graphics were anything but flashy (in those days, they were fantastic!), but that's the best we had back then. Real-time strategy games have evolved a lot over the past two decades, and Clash of Clans - released in 2012 - would forever shape the way these games were played on mobile, spawning a plethora of clones in its wake. For a long time, Clash of Clans was the undisputed leader in the mobile strategy game genre, with not much competition to so much as waver that ranking. Lords Mobile enters the scene in 2016, and the amount of marketing it received was insane, to say the least (even PewDiePie would show strong support for this game, which is no small feat). I'm not exaggerating when I claim that It could easily compete with its main inspiration in terms of critical acclaim. It would additionally offer a more sophisticated experience, so much of Clash of Clans' player base would migrate to the best new thing. This game has also won numerous Google Play awards following its launch, including "Best Competitive Game" and "Android Excellence Game". You could argue that these awards were not warranted, but they were given for a reason. Granted, marketing may have had a lot to do with that, but still! The graphics in this game are no slouch, and they look more refined than those in the already aged Clash of Clans. Nevertheless, if you were to judge from the trailers, you'd be terribly disappointed. The game looks nothing like the flashy visuals you see in the video ads. This is the best example of how not to judge a proverbial book by its cover. With that said, there is no questioning that this game can become addictive, and, to this day, it has a giant player base to back up this claim. However, it's far from being a masterpiece. The amount of grinding you'll have to endure can get taxing, which is not a good thing in a game that is marketed as "casual". This game is also driven by crazy consumerism, which is not an uncommon phenomenon in mobile games, unluckily so (more on that later). Allow me to elaborate because I don't want to seem hostile to the very idea of monetizing a game: Developing a game is more stressful, time-consuming, and expensive than many people care to realize, so I can really relate to the developers' need to reap monetary rewards from their precious product. However, sometimes you have to ask when enough is enough. I frankly am not a big fan of the modern games-as-a-service approach, but I'm also not totally contrarian and, to their credit, some devs do implement interesting monetization techniques that don't kill immersion (Fortnite or Path of Exile come to mind). Lords Mobile, unfortunately. does it terribly, especially when considering its competitive nature. I'll be describing this issue in more detail in the next section.