Dragonstone: Kingdoms

This started out as a fun and good game. It was slowly went down the hill this year. Ember has stopped updating the game, they stopped sending event messages for the weekend (so we don’t know what events are going on), they have a ton of bugs that they have acknowledged but said won’t be fixed, they crash the game during war events (then hours later it comes back online just to find that you’ve been attacked and zeroed because you could not get online to shield due to their game crash), they ignore your support messages to them (outright closes the support case without a response), and the list goes on. The regions are also completely dead. They changed how you grow and made it money based instead of putting in the work. They screwed over the free players drastically when doing so. The free players were once able to compete in the PvP portion of the game with spenders as spenders had to work at ranking up. They just couldn’t buy their way. Now they can buy their way into whatever they want, this crushing the free players and anyone else. Now unless you are dropping hundreds of dollars a week, you are nothing. You can’t even compete without spending money now. It’s sad especially when it used to be a mixed of free and money game play. Now it’s just money based.

After almost 6 months, and making it 124 days before one of “special buys” actually seemed worth it, I almost completely regret not giving up on the game months ago. On the plus side, my $5 didn’t entire go to Ember Entertainment, but back in January (around 80-90 days in) I considered quitting and I decided to hang around and enjoy what I could. While other realms may be “better” than where I was, the game definitely caters towards rewarding those willing to spend, and spend, and spend. While you can remain free to play, you are looking at upwards of 350,000 gems (earned at up to 100 per event every 6 hours) simply to purchase the items required for structural building upgrades, and a single “level 24 building upgrade” that is awarded once per ‘month’ based on sequential logins would also severely limit the ability for a free to play customer being able to max out their structures, if they managed to get the other required gems, first. If you don’t mind being borderline abused, or are looking to be [not so] micro transactioned, with $5-$100 (non-‘starter’) options available, for (hopefully?) months to come- it definitely could be the game for you. For me, I’d much rather would have not invested upwards of 800 hours for the relative lack of enjoyment I got out of it for “most” of my time I spent in the game.

I’ve never been a big fan of games like this; building a city before defending it and attacking other cities.. I downloaded it because of the preview for Adventure Mode with the Final Fantasy-like combat, thinking it was some RPG with a storyline, and ended up falling in love with every bit of the game. I absolutely love it & how much there is to do. Not overwhelming in the least bit but will definitely keep you busy if you want to sit on your phone all day. Lots to do.. Good community.. Amazing overall. Ever since I’ve been playing I’ve been looking into Clash of Clans and Castle Clash, and it seems I downloaded the best one already. Dragonstone is the one you’re looking for.