8 realms is a persistent MMORTS. The gameplay has 3 defining characteristics: The player manages the economy and army of a developing city/empire, this empire persists for about 2 months of real-time, and the player must race to advance from stone age tech all the way to sci-fi tech before any other player on his server does so to win. Once someone reaches this goal of building a "futuristic wonder", the game ends and everyone gets ranked based on their progress.
The cities continue to grow even when the player is logged off. This leads to the first problem with the game: in order to play competitively, players will have to monitor their cities nearly 24/7. Any player that has to do normal real-life things like sleep or go to work/school will fall behind due to their slow reaction to in-game events, unless they pay hefty microtransactions fee to enable queued buildings.
There are many microtransaction fees in this game, all of which affect gameplay. This is what ruins the competitiveness of the game. It is quite literally pay-to-win; players can pay to void construction costs and construction times, as well as pay for the convenience of queues. Whoever wins a game will likely be someone who monitored their cities at least every 3 hours and paid a ton of money. Also, there is no maximum to the amount of money a person can spend; it is possible for a competitor to throw thousands of dollars at this game.
The game has many more issues too. The tooltips are useless for understanding exactly what each building/upgrade does, and many upgrades don't give the player any indication at all of what they do. In fact, none of the building choices explain exactly what number of units they will produce until after the player has made them. The game has an official and an unofficial wiki, but all they contain are the tool tips!
On top of all that, the interface is awful: the town UI constantly has to refresh, the world map has to reload every time the player looks somewhere else, the task (quest) system often fails to recognize completed tasks, there is no sound at all...
Sorry, but I'm ending this review early. There's more to complain about but I've given this game too much time already.