Review of Travian Kingdoms

Nearly non-existent. No backstory for why you are selected to free your initial village, no story at all through the early and mid-game, a bit of story once World Wonders appear.

Gameplay:

Relatively decent, but they have gone so far from their addictive origins in their efforts to imitate more successful games that it has devolved into something else entirely by now, incapable of satisfying veterans, yet still retaining few new players. I agree with the popular opinion of it being boring now through 90% of the game: a bit of fun at the start, some more at the end, if you manage to stick around that long.

Oh! Almost forgot: it's as pay-to-win as it gets. Forget cosmetics and loot boxes. You can enable 2 different 25% resource production boosts, instantaneous building (when some may take over 24hrs for a "non-golder"), farm lists, trade routes, 20% more storage, additional queues for buildings, research and celebrations, and a myriad of other massively unfair advantages through their gambling system (such as instantaneous free resources). That's about 10% of what you can get if you feed their greed.

Support:

The reason I quit the game and initiated my crusade to bury it. Was banned within 2, at most 3 hours after engaging a big offensive kingdom in mind games (over chat), according to a rule that does not exist (offering defensive troops for in-game resources), waiting 24hrs+ for each Support reply (including the initial 24hrs to find out _why_, which they don't bother to provide proactively), with a resolution as convenient as possible for the other kingdom (deletion of all my troops), all while they were at no point capable of sourcing such a rule. As many others have noted, it was of course done without any evidence.

Favoritism not obvious yet? That other kingdom also happened to be very proficient in getting players to delete (many within their own borders and from their own ranks) and getting other kingdoms to join kingdom blocs, both of which the devs allegedly dislike.

Item variety:

Oh, they got plenty of that, since it's one of the main reasons for players to fork out their hard-earned cash. Yet they are still mostly small variations with 3 tiers, with about half of them just affecting troop movements in some way (how creative... /sarcasm).

Graphics:

Pleasant art style, but in the end it's mostly just static 2D images with nothing outstanding and a few animations. Not even a single visual transition anywhere, a concept we've had for nearly a century now. That's just one example.

Community:

Virtually non-existent. Good luck with finding a sitter/dual on the forum or actually engaging in diplomacy (whether on the forum or in-game). Unlike the past Alliance forums that kept information organized if you put effort into it, all you get now are Kingdom messages which will constantly move around your message list and seem to invite players to spam more irrelevant comments (the old forums felt more "official", I guess?).