I had exceptionally low expectations for Warcraft Rumble, but I haven’t been able to put it down since it launched this past weekend. When Blizzard announced it was developing a character collector real-time strategy game for mobile, my assumption was that some C-suite executive Googled ‘Which mobile game makes the most money?’, learned about Clash Royale, and voila: Warcraft Rumble was born. I’m still not convinced that wasn’t how it started, but thank God there’s still some Blizzard magic left in that old building, because this is a damn good strategy game.
I never got into Clash Royale so forgive me if I sound like I’ve just discovered fire 400,000 years too late, but it’s remarkable how well this mobile genre manages to capture the essence of RTS games. Blizzard isn’t just leveraging Warcraft iconography here, its long history of developing deep strategy games has also been put to good use. Yes, even though Blizz is seemingly done with the RTS biz, the legacy of Warcraft and Starcraft lives on in Warcraft Rumble. That wouldn’t sound so depressing if this game wasn’t such a microtransaction-filled nightmare.
First, the good stuff: you’re able to have many hours of fun, possibly even play forever, without spending a dime in Warcraft Rumble. Simply progressing the campaign and completing daily challenges will give you all the currency you need to build your collection of the 70~ minis that are currently in the game. You can complete the collection in less than a week, and each new character you unlock expands your opportunities exponentially. There are no time gates or energy systems forcing you to pay to continue playing either. The grind might be significant, but the entire game is technically available for free.
What has impressed me the most about Rumble is how much depth is involved both in team building and in gameplay. With your collection of minis you’re tasked with building a team of seven - one leader plus six creatures and spells - that you’ll summon on the battlefield to push down lanes, fight other minis, siege towers, and hopefully, kill a boss.
Minis have traits that define what actions they automatically take once they’ve been summoned, and understanding how traits interact with each other is the key to completing each stage. Minis are either melee, ranged, or flying, which have a rock-paper-scissors-like advantage system, but they’re also either single target, squad, or AoE, giving them two overlapping power triangles that you have to recognize and react to on the fly in the heat of battle.
Beyond those traits there’s a whole laundry list of features a mini could have. Some have stealth, some are fast, and some are siege units that are strong against towers and bosses. Some have the unbound trait, meaning they can be summoned anywhere on the map rather than only near towers you control. There are tanks that can be resistant to physical or elemental damage, a ranged Necromancer that summons melee skeletons to protect him, and Banshees that can possess and take control of enemy minis. You can build your team using any of them, and you may potentially encounter any of them in every battle.
The campaign missions are very puzzle-like, requiring you to create specific builds to counter the bosses and minis you’re up against. After the first few tutorial missions, I found myself building entirely new teams for practically every level. Even though there are a lot of minis and they all have specific abilities, I was able to learn them all and understand their nuances quickly because of how demanding the missions are. Rumble is a surprisingly challenging game that requires an aptitude for deck building, precise timing, and careful resource management in order to progress, which is what I’m loving about it. If you’re more of a collector that just wants to spam out summons you can do that too, but it’s going to cost you.
Like most character collectors, you’ll earn a lot quickly, but then you’re ability to progress will slow down greatly. you’re able to keep a lot of momentum by buying gold to continue upgrading your minis once your free sources of gold dry up.
That leads us to the bad stuff: Warcraft Rumble is not shy about asking you to spend money. Early on, every few missions will unlock the opportunities to buy a new time-limited bundle. As you scroll through the shop you’re shown lots of glimmering bundles of currency and upgrade resources and told what a ‘great’ or even ‘legendary’ value they are. Beyond the bundles are special offers that will instantly upgrade a character and give you some extra gold, or you may just buy gold in the Refill category. I just unlocked the ability to buy Arc Energy - another upgrade resource - so there’s no telling how much the store will expand as I continue playing.
It’s all fairly easy to ignore, as far as mobile games go. You do need to visit the store to spend the gold you’ve earned on new minis, but unlike Diablo Immortal, you’ll find the free part of the store right at the top. Early on, you’ll have so much gold dumped on you that you won’t even feel like there’s a reason to spend money. But as these games go, eventually you hit a wall, and suddenly those Mega Tomes and XP boosters start to look a lot more attractive.
That happened for me at Collection Level 15, when most of my minis were around level eight. That’s when the campaign missions started to outlevel me, and I started to feel the pinch to spend money to speed things back up. The quest system allows you to grind XP endlessly, and it even prioritizes your underleveled minis, but the grind is already becoming pretty significant. Buying gold would allow me to take advantage of the daily offers and level my characters up much faster.
None of this even takes into account PVP, which is the real money sink. The early ranks are level-capped, but if you climb high enough, you’ll be competing against players with level 20 minis, the current max-level. Staying competitive will practically require spending money if you want to compete at the highest level.
Warcraft Rumble hasn’t introduced any new sins here that aren’t already mainstream in the mobile market, but it’s always a shame to see the once-great Blizzard submit to the lowest common denominator instead of leading and reinventing in the way it used to. Mobile titles so often feel like store fronts disguised as games, but Rumble is solid, and it had a real opportunity to stand out from the crowd. I would have paid an upfront cost for this game. I even would have paid for a battle pass. But that’s not how you make the most money, and Blizzard doesn’t mind taking a good game and making it worse by pumping it full of microtransactions, as Overwatch 2 proves. I don’t know if this says more about Blizzard or the state of the game industry, but Warcraft Rumble seems to be everything we love and hate about both.
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