As I've said quite a lot of times before in my other reviews, developers are totally breaking games with in-app purchases.
Still right now, everyone expects to get all games in the app store for FREE. You can easily tell by the number of downloads that free games get downloaded much more than paid games. It's almost certainly because not as many people want to pay money for a game. They expect it for FREE, which I don't know why, because console games cost money and 1980s arcade games cost money. Maybe some developer decided to offer their game for free just to get more downloads, and almost EVERYONE else took after it. Which is what some call the "Age of Free."
Anyway, whatever the reason, "free-to-play" does NOT always mean good. Developers need to make money, and to do so they add a load of in-app purchases to try and squeeze money out of players. Usually, this means they fill the game with paywalls and wait times. They take it to the absolute extremes. You are literally waiting weeks for one building to upgrade. You tap "Upgrade Gold Mine" and a timer comes up saying "28d". Four weeks for that one building to upgrade unless you buy "gems" with real money to skip the wait.
The tragic thing is that people are actually paying for this. People actually LIKE this. They like games that make you wait 14 days to upgrade a building or pay £149.99 to buy gems to skip the wait. How else would companies like Electronic Arts and Supercell earn millions through people buying gems alone? “Freemium whales” are splashing out thousands every month just to buy these nonexistent virtual gems. People actually think greedy, manipulative, deluded developers like EA deserve this money. (Supercell isn’t as bad, but they still are very money-grabbing).
Which would you rather choose: get a game for free and find that it's a money-grabbing fake game whose only purpose is to squeeze as much money as possible out of you, or pay money to BUY a game that actually gives you loads of real entertainment?
This is a screenshot of one of Electronic Arts' greedy games, Dungeon Keeper. EA are notorious for taking old games that were really good and creating new "modern takes" on them. There was a game from 1997 called Dungeon Keeper which was apparently really good (I haven't played it before) but EA tried to "bring it back" by making this abomination of a game. "Best Value: £69.99"? BEST VALUE? BEST VALUE to splash out £70 of your hard earned cash on nonexistent gems? NO WAY.