Rating: 3/5 stars
This game is interesting. It's built around the usual base-building attack-and-defend MMO concept, but it's really different to Clash of Clans. Boom Beach is made by the same developer as Clash of Clans, Supercell, and the interface and concepts are quite similar, but there's quite a lot to this game that makes it much better than Clash of Clans.
In Clash of Clans, as I said before, you send your troops into battles to go ambling about hitting everything in their way. Two hits on an archer tower and they go sauntering off to stick a sword into the builder's hut. Random. The best thing with Boom Beach is that there's actually a reasonable degree of strategy to it. There isn't quite as much as I'd have liked, but there is still something.
There's something called a Gunboat that lets you send flares to your troops to direct which building to attack first. The good thing about this is that you can control the troops, practically the least I'd expect in the first place. The bad things are:
1. All the troops go to the flare at once and there's no way to split them up.
2. If you run out of energy to send flares the troops are seriously stupid.
One of the other good things is that the build times aren't as long as in Clash. In Clash town hall upgrades can take up to 14 days for ONE building. Apparently the longest build time in Boom Beach is a little over 2 days. That's still way too much, but at least it isn't going to keep you waiting for such a long time that you want to smash your phone.
Also, inevitably with this type of game (MMO strategy) there's still a slight pay-to-win element to it. If two players started at the same time and one of them invested loads of money into the game, then they could easily crush the free player no matter how good their strategy is.