I used to love the original Warcraft, and Command and Conquer games back in “the day”, what ever the hell that is. Those two games were giant time sucks just like the modern versions or copies of those games. But, I had a blast playing against my office mates, or the computer.
In those days you bought a copy of the game, and quickly got down to business. What you got was a game that had excellent playability, and the challenge being the focus of the designers.
These days there is the concept of the freemium game, where you pay no money up front but to truly excel or speed up the tasks of building out your buildings or infrastructure, and weapons you pretty much have to pay for the privilege by paying cold hard cash for jewels or game money.
This sort of game is therefore not designed for better game play but instead designed to created a level of slowness and frustration intended to force gamers to invest. Without paying, the players engage in gameplay that slows to a crawl with upgrades taking hours or days to accomplish. That big bag of jewels that costs $20 or $100 suddenly becomes mighty desirable and tempting.
This is the model of Boom Beach. It is free for your mobile device until you finally realize that it is going to be extremely increasingly difficult to move forward without spending your money on jewels.
Up next: play boom beach.