Apple / games / MY LANDS
REVIEW
My Lands is a 2010 browser MMO that wandered onto a phone.
Elyland's Russian-developed strategy game has 200,000 active players, four races, and a UI that hasn't been substantially redrawn since the iPad 2. There's a niche audience and the niche is real.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 8, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
My Lands
ELYLAND INVESTMENT COMPANY LIMITED
OUR SCORE
6.4
APPLE
★ 3.0
PRICE
Free
My Lands has been online since 2010 and the design language proves it. The iPhone version is, in practical terms, a browser game running inside a UIWebView with a coat of mobile chrome — the same screens that run in Internet Explorer 9 are the screens you tap on a phone, slightly resized. In any other product category that would be a deal-breaker. In the browser-MMO genre, it’s the entire reason a small but devoted audience still pays attention.
The strategy market on mobile is a near-monoculture in 2026. Lords Mobile, Rise of Kingdoms, and Game of Sultans all run the same gacha-economy template with cosmetic differences. My Lands runs a fundamentally different model — old-school server-based persistent worlds, alliance politics as the actual primary mechanic, real diplomacy where players negotiate truces over multi-month wars. There is genuinely no other game on iOS doing what this game does.
The catch is that everything outside the strategy mechanics is starting to feel its age. The tutorial is rough. The UI is frequently broken. The community moderation is a minefield. For players who already know they want this, none of that matters; for everyone else, the on-ramp is steep enough that the question is whether the depth is worth the friction. The honest answer is that for most readers, it isn’t.
My Lands has been alive for 16 years. That's almost the only argument left for installing it.
FEATURES
My Lands is a browser-based real-time strategy MMO from Russian studio Elyland, launched in 2010 and still actively maintained. Players develop a kingdom from a single town, train armies (with units that vary by race), and compete with other players for territory and a premium in-game currency called Black Gems. There are four races (Elves, Drow, Demons, Knights) split between Light and Dark factions; choosing dictates your unit roster, alliance pool, and the shape of mid-to-late game.
The iOS app is a wrapper around the browser game with native chat and notification handling layered on top. There are around 200,000 active players globally and the game has been translated into 20+ languages. Some servers have been running continuously for over a decade.
Black Gems are a freemium-currency-cum-cryptocurrency: in-game spending unit, in some regions claimed convertible to real money. The "play to earn" framing is heavily emphasised in marketing; in practice, the conversion paths are restrictive enough that almost no one breaks even on time invested.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Depth is the achievement. There are mechanics here — alliance politics, tax-policy diplomacy, scouting espionage — that genuinely don't exist in the modern mobile-strategy market. Travian, Tribal Wars, Ogame players who lost their respective games to monetisation will recognise My Lands as the closest surviving cousin to that era of strategy MMO.
The race variety is real. Drow play differently from Knights. The asymmetry isn't cosmetic. For players who came up on Warcraft III and lost ten weeks of their life to old-school Travian rounds, this is an experience the iOS market doesn't otherwise offer in 2026.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Almost everything else. The mobile UI is a barely-touched browser port — text overflows, hit targets are sized for a desktop pointer, and tooltips clip off the screen on the bottom of an iPhone 16 Pro Max. The tutorial is in heavily-translated English and assumes the player has played a browser MMO before; first-time RTS players will be lost in the first hour.
Player reviews on the App Store complain about administration practices — bans without explanation, moderation favouring high-spenders — at a frequency that's hard to read as anything other than a real pattern. The Black Gems economy includes pay-to-progress shortcuts that make peaceful play viable but competitive play extremely expensive.
The Elyland studio's geographic situation (the company is registered with offices in Cyprus and historical operations in Russia) has not been publicly disclosed in detail since 2022. Players in some jurisdictions may want to consider that.
CONCLUSION
Install My Lands if you spent 2008-2014 on Travian, Ogame, or one of the other turn-based strategy MMOs that the modern mobile market has flattened into Lords Mobile clones. Skip it otherwise — the modern Strategy & Tactics genre on iOS has cleaner alternatives if you only want depth, and cleaner alternatives still if you only want polish.