

If you don’t have enough, a timer that runs in real time shows you when it will be ready. If you have enough mana to play a card, it shows up in colors. The options for playable cards show up in the bottom of the screen. It has two lanes for combat, in contrast to five for typical MOBA games. You have a slate of characters that you can drop onto the field, and they start moving slowly toward the enemy’s defenses, which consist of two forts and a main castle. It has a slight loading time at the beginning or end of a match. I haven’t seen a hiccup yet in my battles against real players. For this to function smoothly on mobile requires some huge infrastructure. But the blend itself makes for something uniquely addictive, as I found in my own play session.Ĭlash Royale goes further than Clash of Clans - which has asynchronous battles, where one online player attacks and an offline player defends - in switching to synchronous, real-time combat. Clash Royale is a blend of Clash of Clans, real-time strategy, and multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games such as League of Legends. It’s no wonder that Apple gave the new game a huge feature position in the App Store when it launched on Wednesday. But Clash Royale shows that Supercell still has huge advantages even as it remains a relatively small game studio. Its success has spawned a lot of other mobile-game startups in Helsinki, and everybody is chasing the company’s success. When telecommunications company SoftBank purchased a controlling stake in Supercell in June 2015, Supercell was valued at an astonishing $5.5 billion. That kind of religious focus on quality has earned Supercell some loyal followers, and it tells you a lot about why Clash Royale is so important.

One of them, Smash Land, was pretty far along in development when the company decided to kill it in mid-2015. Supercell rigorously tests its games in certain markets before releasing them. Ilkka Paananen, the CEO of Supercell in Helsinki, Finland, said on his Facebook page recently that he was happy to release Clash Royale, particularly after the company had killed so many other games. This is Supercell’s fourth hit after Clash of Clans, Boom Beach, and Hay Day. 1 on Google Play downloads in the U.S., but it isn’t showing high on the top-grossing list just yet. Then again, it is no surprise that Supercell, which has lots of fans and multiple hits, is the one to dethrone its own No.

But it’s rare, as mentioned, for anyone to break into the top-grossing list that has been dominated by Supercell, Machine Zone, and King. 1 in top downloads as people discover them.
