Lords Mobile Godzilla Kong War 2.127

The first thought that came to my mind when I launched Lords Mobile was "How blatantly obvious it is that they've just mixed in WarCraft and Clash of Clans imagery to try and pull a seemingly attractive looking game for the unwashed masses to consume." Yeah, Lords Mobile opens up with some generic good vs evil battle, where some feature-exaggerated low poly army units and their over-sized leader smash away at a wall. You get no control over what happens whatsoever. Not a good first impression for someone who expects some meat out of this game.

Design-wise, characters are as flamboyant as they come. I cannot understand why they need to move so much while they're talking to you or spouting valiant generic dialog to their enemies. They're always wiggling their pelvises around like they need to go to the loo, or something...

You can clearly notice that I absolutely hate the visual design of this game. But how about gameplay?

I think I've spent a little over an hour just tapping away at all those messages, quest notifications, reward collections and other sort of glittery-bumpy-attention-seeking button out there, just in order to get a calm and clean game environment so that I'd take a methodical approach at studying this goddamn game. Needless to say, I didn't get my wish.

I understand that IGG wanted to make a very wide game (note: not deep) with a ton of resources, upgrades and things to do. However, their method of presenting all these systems to the newcomer is hardly appetizing. I dunno about you, but I like to explore one subsystem at a time, impose my own pace, and get a little bit of leg room before continuing to the next bit of gameplay. Lords Mobile doesn't let you do that. The "tutorial" simply romps through everything and then expects you to do just fine while also putting in some shekels for those super-duper-bonuses. I honestly got bored after a while.

But I guess I at least owe you to relate some relevant bits about Lords Mobile, besides my over extended rant. Lords seems to be a mix of territory control and hero stat advancement (because you can hardly call stats to be representative of an RPG). You get to build certain buildings on your conquered territory (called "turf" in fantasy-gangsta-lingo). However, you want to build more buildings but don't have the space to do it. So, you recruit some units, upgrade some heroes and go attack some adjacent territory. After a rather automated battle sequence you get to experience a win or a defeat. The process can be repeated if conquest was not achieved. All of this happens in real time. So I have no idea how the game tackles this in multiplayer. Can the defender fight back? Is it a timing thing? I'm not even remotely interested in finding out. For the really curious, I'm afraid there's no other way than to install Lords Mobile.

There's also some hero-ing aspect, which is going through a couple of enemies with your little coterie of selected heroes in order to reach da' "boss", kick its bum and steal the loot. Amazingly, although you still don't have any choice as to who attacks what (just as during battles), spells and special abilities do allow you to pick a target, or choose the direction of the effect.

Final Thoughts

Lords Mobile is representative of the class of abominations that are called games these days. Instead of a clean and well thought out gameplay, they flood you features, bonuses and other useless complications as to fool you into thinking that there's some value. There isn't, and the sooner gamers stop downloading this kind of crap, the sooner this freemium model will collapse and devs will need to put their thinking caps back on.