Heya board, back with another review. This one’s tough for me, I cannot lie. It’s not a graphic or explicit game, it didn’t traumatize me or anything but it’s a game that I could have considered my favorite at one point. At its core, it’s a really fun experience and was the rare mobile exclusive game that I truly enjoyed. This of course is not one of the many video essays that exist on the game’s downfall or a plea to make it better. It’s just a review of Clash Royale. A free-to-play mobile game released by Supercell in 2016, Clash Royale is a real-time tower defense game where you use cards to destroy your opponent’s towers. Seeing as this is a live service game that has been receiving updates since its release, I cannot touch on every part of its history.
The game has always had the same gameplay loop since the beginning. Each player has a king tower at the back with two towers in front of it. They will automatically attack enemy troops nearby, but the king won’t attack until a tower has been destroyed or it has been damaged. Players also have eight cards that they can use which all cost elixir. The player can have a maximum of ten elixir and they generate more when the game has one minute left. If the king is destroyed, the other king automatically wins. After three minutes pass, whoever destroys the most towers wins but if there is a tie at three minutes the game goes on until any tower is destroyed. After two minutes of overtime are up, all cards are destroyed and all towers slowly take damage until one is destroyed.
Clash Royale released with 42 cards but this number has slowly grown to 123 over the past eight or so years. There are three types of card that come in five different rarities. Troops can only be placed on the player’s side of the field and automatically walk towards the king tower. Some may lock onto different cards and towers along the way to attack them instead. Buildings can also only be placed on the player’s side of the field but they cannot move and will slowly decay. The player’s deploy range increases when they destroy a tower, increasing their attack options. Spells are single use abilities that affect an area of the field. These range from raw damage to summoning skeletons. The five rarities are Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary and Champion. Most differences come down to rarity, power and uniqueness but champions are extra unique, as they are the only card type with an active ability.
On launch, only the common through epic rarities were in the game, with legendary cards being added a few updates in. Cards would be added every few weeks with a new arena to climb to occasionally. Rarities did not have equalized levels. Legendaries could be upgraded to level 6, while commons could be upgraded to level 12 which the king tower also was. These levels were shuffled after a few updates, bringing the effective level cap to 13. Eventually in 2018, levels would be normalized and different rarities would simply start at different levels. In late 2021, the level cap would be increased to 14 and champions would be added. In mid 2023, the level cap would be finally increased to level 15 with the release of card evolutions. Level 15 is the elite level, which does not need gold to level up but needs a lot of elite wild cards from any level 14 card to level up. Card evolutions are powerful variants of cards that only come after cycling through to them a couple times, with a new unique passive ability.
On paper all of this is fine. The game would increase in levels as more unique gimmicks add to the gameplay. In practice, Clash Royale is a free-to-play mobile game. For free players, they could only slowly unlock chests they win from battles and challenge rewards. Clans were a good way to guarantee rewards as well, letting the players request cards and win chests with the clan to get a big reward every week. In late 2018, they also added trade tokens which let players trade a large amount of cards. Als in mid 2018, they removed the chest for Clan Wars. Clan Wars is a lot more involved than the chest and had the players compete to get cards for their clan so they can use them for the final clan battles which let the winners earn big rewards. The losers would earn less than they could have from a clan chest for the same work. It was disheartening, but in mid 2020, Clan Wars II was released where players had to race a boat down the river for even lamer rewards and a lot more involvement. Clans were not a system that let free to play players really catch up with someone who paid to get them.
Free to play players slowly did catch up in economy eventually and were fine until the late 2021 level 14 update. Right before the update was announced, Supercell held a gold rush event, which gave players a lot of gold and incentivized them to spend a lot of it. Normally gold would be saved to level up cards to level 13 and players would hold onto gold for the few cards they’d use out of the roster but with so much gold they spent. This caused major backlash when level 14 was announced because of how many more cards and gold were needed to level up and players couldn’t get ahead due to the spending during the gold rush event. A similar thing happened around level 15’s release and the backlash was even worse. Gold was not needed for the new level and the new level needed so many cards that free players could only get one every two to three months. Evolutions also did not need gold to unlock, needing six shards for a card to unlock. The game has always had controversial decisions within the community but these are the very few times that people widely agree that Supercell did bad. Including the April 2025 update.
In April 2025 rewards were butchered. Chests were heavily nerfed and can only be gotten through events and the battle pass now. Which are also the only way to get any card unlock now. The daily card rewards can only drop a single card that the player already owns and lucky drops have a drop pool of every card, gold and cosmetics that it picks one of. Even the tutorial’s guaranteed card is no longer guaranteed since the player got that through a chest. Now new players can be left with seven cards at the start, which the game won’t let the player play without an eight card deck. The game economy has been ruined, with gold being useless and cards being a pain to get. It’s the main reason people fell out of love with this game. The reason they fell in love with it was the gameplay.
The cards tend to land on the simpler side, with even the most complex cards being timing based. It all works really well due to the variety. Even though there are niches like “light spells”, “fireballies”, and “mini-tanks” each card is unique and has its place in a deck. There are a few archetypes of decks that play differently and is handled differently. Beatdown has players build one big push on one lane. It includes heavy cards like Golem or Giant that walk to the tower and support includes Night Witch that summons bats and Wizard that deals a lot of splash damage. Cycle has the player win interactions by getting to their win condition faster than the opponent. Cheap cards like Ice Spirit and Skeletons can peel as defense while being the cheapest cards in the game and Hog Rider is a fast attacker that requires a proper counter that the enemy might not get back to. Logbait revolves around using several squishy cards so the enemy needs to choose where to use their log. The Log rolls down a lane and deals good damage, great at killing goblins from the Goblin Barrel and the Princess which can chip down towers without a quick response. Both of the latter and more cards are used to make the enemy hesitate and choose where the log goes. There are more decks that the player can use but these are the most common.
There are many interactions and cards that some tend to be stronger that others. Like Mega Knight, a seven card tank that destroys things on landing. It has a lot of hp and can jump on enemies further that can receive support to melt the few proper counters it has with an evolution that knocks back enemies which remove its main counter, mini-tanks. There’s also Freeze, a spell that can completely stop anything in the zone for four seconds, which is more than enough to completely melt a tower if the thing used to counter the push is frozen. Tornado is also a spell that makes activating king towers free. It pulls troops to the center that makes a core mechanic that can disable entire decks easily. Not all cards are made equally and some are just infuriating to fight. Ruining any complex strategy by being brain dead and working.
I don’t recommend this game to anyone in its current state. There is a chance that you would not even be able to play the game. If you asked me last year I would have, I got a friend into this and we’ve been playing near daily. Yet with recent updates, progression is neutered to the point where a new player couldn’t get far without months of waiting. There aren’t many games like this and at one point it was a really good game. Now there’s no buzz around this game. It will have millions of players it dies sure, but no ones excited when something comes up about this game even in the community. There’s not much good faith left after the community has gotten burned again and again, the ever present theme of not being able to play with the new toys at the highest level without forking over more cash than the average Nintendo Switch game. This was a 9/10 game for me, 10/10 in terms of gameplay in 2017. Now it’s a mere 4/10. Other games may be more problematic, have more genuine issues or just not flat out be fun in any space. No single game’s life cycle will make me as sad as Clash Royale’s however.
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