I’ve been playing with my CoC on and off for about 10 or so years now. I remember when it was relatively new, and all of my friends in middle school were hyping up their TH7 bases asking everyone to join their clans. That inner child in me will always love CoC for the memories of warm summer mornings checking my base on my iPod 5, but the more popular it got, the less accessible it became.

One thing that has truly ruined CoC is YouTube. There are way too many people with massive fanbases of impressionable children. The more popular they got, the more buying your way to the top became the norm. The only issue, though, is the fact that those YouTubers can afford it. The people who want to casually play this game, cannot.

I started a new base back in 2020 with the intention of reaching the top without ever spending a dime. I got to about Th9 until I realized that you really just can’t. If you have the patience to wait months to max out your base before upgrading then sure, you don’t have to spend money at all. But, the perks of something like Gold Pass is something that’s nearly mandatory. I know $6.99/mo. compared to the hundreds/thousands of dollars people spend in other free online games seems insignificant, but when the entire game is advertised as free and they start bombarding you with “TREASURE CHEST OF GEMS ONE HUNNID DOLLA!!!!” it starts to irritate me.

So I caved, and now I have Gold Pass. The abundance of spell books, builder potions, wall rings, etc. is great. Yet I have to live in shame knowing I’m paying money to play a mobile game faster. Not just faster, but at a tolerable pace. Speaking of the potions and spells, it takes WAY too long to upgrade ANYTHING after TH8. I believe they even had some huge update years ago where they reduced the time of upgrades, and plenty of things are over a week now. Not to mention how many troops there are to upgrade, how long they all take, and how expensive they all are. At least they made training troops free, it helps to farm.

I play this game a lot. Not as much as I used to, but I go through phases of how often I open the app. I guess my appreciation for CoC is more nostalgic than how fun the game is, but I wouldn’t play it at all if I didn’t find it fun. Attacking bases, upgrading your weapons and buildings, figuring out the best placement of your base, it makes for fun strategizing. The gradual movement of your placement in leagues or the different troops you use when you realize you’ve moved too far up to use an army you’ve grown accustom to, it’s just relaxing.

Unfortunately, CoC is practically pay to win. You don’t HAVE to, and it isn’t impossible to move up far without spending a dime, but the rewards that $6.99 can get you are too tempting, and important to the game, to pass it up. That’s a huge flaw. If you don’t pay for anything, it just takes forever. But, it’s incredibly fun at the style of play it aims to achieve. 7/10.

I cannot stand this game. I'm biased because back when this game dropped I was in school and literally everyone was playing it and wouldn't stop talking about it.

I tried many many times to get into it, but I just find it tedious and dull. You spend most of your time not playing the game as you wait literal days for stuff to be built. Raids are boring. The whole thing just feels really cheap animation and production wise and everything is absurdly expensive to build.

I can't reccomend.

It's very rare for a piece of media, particularly a video game, to insult me. So if there's one that does, you should know it's a particularly awful outlier.

Clash of Clans is a video game that insults me on a personal level. Its only purpose is to lure players in with the promise of a good time, then bore them to death in the hopes of milking every last drop from their wallets. It's dull, it's repetitive, its few good ideas are done infinitely better in other games, and it helped ruin the mobile gaming landscape.

Genuinely, fuck this game. The only reason it gets more than a half star is because it can be fun for about an hour. Otherwise, it is a completely worthless piece of shit and a stain on the gaming industry.