Games Are Supposed to be Fun, Not Piss You Off

There’s a good chance that you’ve gotten sucked in by an ad for what looks like a pretty fun game. They’re pretty hard to escape, especially if you’re on the Ex-Bird Site or Instagram. And all you want is a happy diversion from whatever else you’ve got going with your day.

That’s where I was in March of 2023, when I saw an ad on IG Stories for a game called Top War.

At the time, it looked like a fun enough game. Once I downloaded and installed the game, I found almost immediately that the ads were complete horseshit. But it was still a game, so I started playing with some intrigue.

Since that time, I discovered a few things. One is that people absolutely suck. As a multi-player game, you’d think that there would be some sort of comradery among the different groups. But nope. There were entirely too many weirdos who had way too much money on their hands, spending it on items and boosters that made it impossible for someone who’s playing the game for free to actually enjoy the experience.

Beyond that, there’s the problem of players being so self-involved that they’ll destroy one game server to move to another, effectively abandoning the players just minding their own business and ignoring whatever inter-server bullshit is going on. This happened to me not once, but twice. And when the migrating players reached out to me asking me what I planned to do, it took everything in my power not to tell them to go fuck themselves.

And don’t get me started on the tie-ins. I don’t like Kung-Fu Panda or GI Joe that much that I’m going to pay to have new characters added to my account. And what on Earth is wrong with Hasbro and Dreamworks that they feel the overbearing need to be affiliated with such a sketchy operation?

For whatever reason, I took to the games page on the Google Play Store to lean into my grievances over the entire game, and flat-out told Rivergames, the clown shoes of an operation the developed this money-trap, not to bother responding.

So of course, they responded with some canned horsecrap that did nothing to assuage my dissatisfaction.

I finally got around to deleting Top War, because I’m over the tedious, not-even-close-to-fun time I had playing the game. I also probably should have done this earlier, given that not only did the experience suck, there’s no telling what kind of data mining Rivergames did and sold to another, sketchier operation.

And it’s not the only game out there that pulls this crap. There are dozens of clones out there that do the same batch-and-switch that Top War does, so all I can say is avoid all of them.