Found this in my drafts repository. I guess I wrote it in November and forgot about it. Since I don’t really have time to do any well thought out posts right now, I figured I’d go ahead and put it up. I’ve since gotten bored with and uninstalled this silly game.

So, I got an iPad earlier this year. It’s my first Apple device, and I have to say, I rather like it. I probably use it more than my laptop for casual browsing at this point. And unlike my phone (which is tiny, likes to run out of internal memory so often that I had to uninstall Twitter, and is fond of freezing up at any given moment), it can play mobile games. Now that I have access to such a device, I thought to myself, “Why not play some random stuff and write about it?” So, once a week (okay, let’s be realistic here: whenever I feel like it), I’ll download a free mobile game, try it out, and tell you if it seems promising. I’ll try to put my phone through its paces and play some Android games too, but anything that can’t live on the micro SD card is out of the question.

With the first movie based on The Hobbit coming out soon, fans might have noticed a little game on iOS or Android called The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-earth. It has a picture of Bilbo plastered on the icon, and the screenshots are interesting enough, so I downloaded it.

Screenshot of the game. Pretty, isn’t it? Too bad you have to stop playing it to play it.

The app in a sentence? KoM is a thinly veiled money sink that is probably only using themes from The Hobbit to get fans to try it out and become addicted. That’s only one way of thinking about it, though. If you pretend the in-app purchases don’t exist, KoM becomes an even weirder animal: it’s a game that encourages you not to play it in an effort to…I dunno. Make it seem more fun?

So, the game is a bit like Sim City in Middle-earth, but it’s a little odd. I mean, have you ever met a game that wanted you put it down? Seriously, going off and doing something else is a major mechanic of KoM if you’re insistent on not paying for it. I guess I should back up and explain how the game works, though.

The first thing you do when you start the app is pick a side–Elves or Dwarves. I’m pretty sure the Elves and Dwarves weren’t having an all-out war when Bilbo came into the picture, but whatever. I guess the designers needed factions so you’d have real people to defend your city against, and no one’s going to pick the goblins. If they’d let you be part of Sauron’s team, they could have had some awesome looking evil cities, so I feel like that’s a real missed opportunity. Then, it actually would have made sense to have Saruman as a hero. More on that shortly.

Clearly, I haven’t used my heroes much. I’ve only been playing a few days. But Saruman? Really? Why are you here?

In any case, after you’ve picked a side and gone through a tutorial, you pretty much just start building. You can make homes to increase your population, build facilities to train troops, research various useful technologies, fortify your defenses, and gather resources to build more stuff. You have seven days to do as much building up as you can before other players can attack you. Meanwhile, there’s a nifty social aspect where you can make alliances with other players, though I’ve yet to see anyone in the chat that I’d actually want to play with.

Getting back to the Saruman point from earlier: throughout all of this, if you keep upgrading your Great Hall, you have access to various familiar characters from Middle-earth to act as heroes for your city. They lead troops into battle or oversee various aspects of your city building to provide boosts. For some reason, your happy Elven city can have Saruman as a hero. Pretty sure he was evil. I suppose they didn’t know he was evil in The Hobbit, but whatever. He’s bad.

Let’s back away from canon gripes and get to the most annoying thing about KoM. The build times are pretty fast at first, but then you get into upgrading. At the moment, some of the things I want to upgrade or research will take as much as three hours to finish, and I only anticipate the times getting worse. This is where the money grab comes into play. If you’re impatient, you can use these handy hourglasses to speed up the whole process, but they cost mithril. You start out with ten bars of mithril, and you can buy more starting at $4.99 for 50 bars and going all the way up to $99.99 for 1600 bars. That’s right, you can sink as much as a hundred bucks into this game in one go. The most popular in-app purchase (according to the game) is 240 mithril for $19.99.

So much money could be spent here.

So, if you can’t stand waiting for things to finish so you can get back to actually playing the game, you could easily spend a load of money on KoM. Then, you’d also most certainly have an advantage over players who just want to play for free.

KoM is pretty (the aesthetic really does fit in well with the source material), and I actually have fun seeing my city grow and conquering new lands, but I don’t think I’ll ever pay a penny to play this game. I’d rather give Guild Wars 2 or TF2 my microtransaction money for something that won’t leave my account in a matter of minutes.

The Good: It’s a pretty mobile game, and the city building is actually kind of fun. Middle-earth source material is always a bonus.

The Bad: The excessively long build times are just absurd. And Saruman shouldn’t be allowed to be a hero.

Bottom Line?: If you want to play for free, don’t bother with it unless you’re 1) patient or 2) well-disciplined about not spending a ton of money on in-app purchases.