Lords Mobile seeks to replicate the success of so many other games like Clash of Clans but with the added benefit of more visual effects and more focus on building up one’s own towns.
The game begins with some sort of story background that doesn’t really hold a lot of relevance to the game or even to the progressing story, but is quite pretty all the same. You are then thrust into the game proper with some rather scantily dressed characters informing you what to do next, including the standard “build a farm” and “upgrade your castle” as tends to be standard in this genre of games.
From there, the tutorial characters keep giving you instruction how to play, including attack some NPC towns with weak forces, giving you a little taste of the battles.[sc name=”quote” text=”including attack some NPC towns with weak forces, giving you a little taste of the battles.”]
The actual battles themselves are pretty enough; with some nice visual effects with arrows flying and enemies being tossed like ragdolls, it is certainly visually pleasing. The only problem is that you don’t really participate in the fight at all. You can control the direction the camera faces when fighting, but other than that you just sit back and watch the battle take place. It’s pretty clear who’s going to win due to the military strength meter at the bottom, so it’s just watching your armies batter the enemy wall until it falls down, a brief and awkward pause, then fighting the remaining troops.
Although a pleasing visual experience is important for games like this, it would certainly be great if you could participate in the cool battles unfolding right in front of you. At least in other games of this genre, they hide the battle through statistic screens and battle reports – in Lords Mobile, it almost feels like you’re being teased with the possibility of fighting a cool battle, only to have the opportunity taken away from you.
Another issue with Lords Mobile is the absolute overcrowding of the user interface. There are just simply far too many massive screens and UI information clogging up your phone. So much information overload and having to click through so many screens means it’s entirely unclear what’s going on; every mission or objective completed rewards you with tons of resources and loads of other experience points or other stats, but none of it really means anything due to massive information overload.[sc name=”quote” text=”but none of it really means anything due to massive information overload.”]
It very much else like Lords Mobile is trying to create the “new thing”, something to supplant the current leaders of this genre. It would appear they decided to do this by including far too much additional intricacies and details, hoping it would add further complexity to the game.
Instead of additional complexity making a better game, Lords Mobile is just a confusing mess, filled with loads of tooltips and info but not a lot of differing gameplay.
Some of the animations are pretty, but the lack of interesting gameplay or really any kind of differences from other games makes Lords Mobile difficult to play and even more difficult to enjoy.
[review pros=”Pretty animations and colorful ascetic.” cons=”Way too much info on the UI. Very little game differences from other, similar games from the genre.” score=4]
[appbox appstore id1071976327]
[appbox googleplay com.igg.android.lordsmobile]
