I don’t usually write about games. But here we are.
After heavy work sessions - the kind where your brain feels wrung out and you just need somewhere quiet to exist for twenty minutes - I’d open something like Rise of Cultures. Place a few buildings. Watch numbers go up. Not think about anything important. It sounds silly. It wasn’t. That kind of low-effort mental rest is genuinely hard to find, and this game delivered it reliably for a long time.
So yeah. This one stings a little.
It Was Actually Good. That’s the Frustrating Part.
Early game is great. Like, genuinely great. The historical progression gives you just enough hook to care, upgrades feel rewarding, every session ends with a sense of movement. Egypt, Greece, Rome - clean, satisfying, exactly what you want from this kind of game.
I stuck with it long enough to get through almost everything. Vikings, the Moors, the Americas - I had nearly all of it. The only era I never touched was the Late Gothic, the one they dropped in early 2026. That’s not a small commitment. That’s years of sessions.
And at some point it just… stopped working.
The Actual Problem
It’s not that you have to collect resources. That’s the genre. That’s fine.
It’s that you need an absurd amount of resources for changes that feel completely trivial. You spend three or four days grinding just to unlock a minor upgrade. A small building. A marginal improvement to something you’ve already been running for months. And the only way to make that process feel remotely efficient is to pay.
That’s the design. That’s not a side effect - it’s the whole point.
And the thing that makes it genuinely exhausting is the pace of collection. You can’t set it up and check in once every couple of days. You can’t let it run and come back knowing something will have moved. You have to open the app two, three, four, sometimes five times a day just to keep the queues moving - and even then, you’re looking at one meaningful update every three or four days if you’re lucky. The game doesn’t let you ignore it. It’s designed to keep you coming back constantly for no real payoff.
That loop - check in, collect, wait, check in again, collect again, eventually afford a small thing - is what’s supposed to keep you engaged. Instead it just makes you feel like you’re doing chores. And then it offers to let you skip the chores for real money.
Not for cosmetics. Not for skins or a different colour scheme. To progress. To play the actual game at a speed that feels normal.
That’s the part that bothers me most. Pay-to-skip-the-slog has become completely standard over the last five to ten years, and at some point we just stopped questioning it. You’re not buying an advantage over other players. You’re buying the ability to play without wanting to put your phone down every time you open it. That’s a deeply stupid thing to charge for, and somehow it became the industry default.
The Part Where I Actually Quit
The thing that finally broke it for me isn’t dramatic. I just looked at what I was doing - opening an app multiple times a day to collect things, so that three days later I could make a change I’d barely notice - and I couldn’t find the reason to keep doing it. The relaxation I used to get from it was gone. What was left was obligation.
The grind doesn’t feel like a game anymore. It feels like the game is holding progress hostage until you either commit an unreasonable amount of time or open your wallet. And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.
I Know What They’re Doing. That’s Not the Point.
Yes, I understand the mechanics are tuned this way on purpose. I’m not naive about free-to-play design - I’ve played enough of these games to recognise the shape of it immediately.
The issue isn’t that monetization exists. The issue is when you can feel the game working against you. When friction stops feeling like challenge and starts feeling like manipulation. The moment a player thinks “this was designed to frustrate me into paying” - trust is gone. And once trust is gone, so are they.
What makes this particularly frustrating is that this isn’t a new problem. It’s not like something changed recently and the game took a bad turn. This has been the core loop for years. They never fixed it. They just kept adding content on top of it.
And Then They Made a New Game
Here’s the part that really got to me: Innogames built Heroes of History. A new title, same historical premise, city-building plus progression. From what I can tell, things are actually slightly better designed there - the systems are a bit more thought through.
They didn’t let Rise of Cultures players bring anything over.
I get it, they’re separate games, different infrastructure, whatever. But it’s hard not to read it as: we know the old game has fundamental problems, we didn’t want to fix them, so we started fresh and left the existing playerbase where they are. If they’d sunset Rise of Cultures and given players a migration path, at least that would be honest. Instead the old game just keeps running, keeps getting new content - they just added a whole Gothic era - but none of the underlying issues that have been driving people away for years have actually been addressed.
So you get new eras, new buildings, new resources to grind. The machine gets bigger. The problem stays the same.
The Bigger Thing I’m Sad About
Look at the Rise of Cultures subreddit now. It’s mostly new players asking basic questions - and people with actual progression, the ones who’ve been there for years, quietly disappearing. They don’t make posts about quitting. They just stop showing up. And when they do comment, it’s usually to say they left and didn’t go back.
What bothers me most is that this game, when it worked, actually served a real purpose. Not just entertainment - decompression. A place your brain can go that isn’t work, isn’t stress, isn’t anything with real stakes. That’s not nothing. For a lot of people that’s genuinely part of how they function.
When a game trades that away for timers and gem prompts, it doesn’t just lose a player. It removes something that was actually working.
I really do hope they fix it. I’d come back if they did.
But for now - it was a nice run.
If you hit the same wall, you’re not alone. Most people with any real time in the game seem to end up in the same place.