Backpack Attack

Dead on wave four, and the game asked if I had 25 gems

I opened Backpack Attack thinking it was a monster shooter to kill time with, the kind you fiddle with for ten minutes and then uninstall. I held out until the fourth monster wave of the very first level, then the cowboy went down. The game showed a very polite dialog asking whether I'd like to revive for 25 gems.

At that moment I had exactly 10 in my wallet, the gems the game hands every new player. Tapping the revive button brought up the gem shop in place of the battle. That was when I understood what this game's loop is built around.

A battle comes down to two things: packing and merging

Each level is split into four monster waves, and during all four you never control your character. The cowboy stands on the left and shoots on his own, while a horde of bright green monsters crawls in from the right edge. Your job sits entirely in the bottom half of the screen, where there's a nine-slot backpack and a row of freshly dropped items.

You drag the pistol, the gloves or the potion from that row into empty slots in the backpack. Each item takes up its own shape, so you have to plan the space before you drop it. Three cards around the backpack show your damage, armour and critical chance at once, and all three jump instantly every time you squeeze in another item.

When you're done you tap Battle and watch for about fifteen seconds, and at the end of the wave a treasure chest drops a bit more gold for you. It sounds simple, but that short rhythm had me playing wave after wave without even noticing.

Two old pistols merge into a better one

What sets this game apart from an ordinary tower defense game is the merge rule. Drop a pistol right onto the one already sitting in your backpack and both disappear. In their place appears a higher-tier pistol, and it still takes up exactly the same slots, so you don't lose any space.

Tap an item in the backpack and the game opens a card showing its rarity and how many times it has been merged. The same card also lists its damage and the cooldown between shots. A common pistol deals 30 damage, merging two up to UnCommon takes it to 45, and every tier also shaves a little off the cooldown.

Because the backpack only has nine slots, by mid-level you always have to choose. Either you squeeze in another mediocre item to fill the gap, or you leave the slot empty and wait for exactly the item you can merge. The Reroll button swaps the whole row for 5 gold, but the price jumps to 10 on the second tap.

Beyond the pirate beach, a whole locked cabinet of heroes

When a run ends, win or lose, the game sends you back to the map screen. The first stage is called Pirate Island and is labelled Easy, while three small dots under the picture tell you there are two more stages waiting after it.

Right next to the play button sits a locked Boss Duel, above it a locked Season 1 bar, and the bottom row has no fewer than three buttons wearing padlocks. All that's open to a newcomer is two sections: the map and the hero cabinet.

The hero cabinet shows 1 out of 6 right in the middle of the screen. The cowboy is the only hero you have, while Wizard Girl standing next to him costs 500 purple crowns, and Miner, Commander and Ice Man are still in the dark.

Tap the hero you're using and a branching upgrade tree appears. Each node adds 5% health or 5% damage, and there's a reset button so you can redistribute the points from scratch.

Where the game starts counting your money

Purple crowns decide whether you can unlock a new hero, and they only drop at the end of each run. A run I lost on wave three paid me 7 crowns when I tapped skip. Sit through a video ad and the number goes up to 21.

Divide 500 by 21 and you get more than twenty runs, each with an ad attached, just to unlock a single hero. Skip the ads and it jumps to seventy runs, and that's for the cheapest hero in the cabinet.

Gems follow a completely different path. They don't drop during levels and are only used to revive, at 25 a time, and to reroll the stat row between waves, so once you're out of gems every fall ends the run.

That's exactly when the gem shop opens, offering a 100-gem pack for $0.99, a 1000-gem promo pack for $8.99 and a 5000-gem pack for $49.99. On the store listing, Backpack Attack's in-app items run from about a dollar up to nearly a hundred dollars.

There's also an ADS Remove button blinking in the right corner of the main screen. It asks $14.99 to switch off forced ads and double the end-of-run rewards. Ads in this game are fairly dense, with a big frame covering almost half the screen every few minutes, so that button didn't end up there by accident.

The mod opens the very panel that blocked me

The MOD menu for this game is so compact it has a single line, called Paid packs for free. Turn that switch on first, then fully close the game and reopen it to be safe. After that, just play normally until the gem shop shows up.

I tapped all three real-money packs in that panel one after another. The gem count at the top of the screen went from 10 to 110, then to 5110, and stopped at 6110. No payment screen opened and not a cent left my account.

More importantly, those gems really spend; they're not a decorative number. I fully closed the game, switched the toggle off and reopened it, and my gem stash was all still there. On my next fall, tapping revive cost exactly 25 gems and the cowboy got back up to fight on through wave three.

A few things I ran into while testing, so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• The $14.99 ADS Remove pack looked like a dud at first, because an ad that had already loaded was still on screen. It does work: after closing and reopening the game, the whole ad strip at the bottom was gone, and the ADS Remove button vanished from the main screen and never came back.
• Nothing in the MOD menu touches the gold you collect in battle or the purple crowns used to unlock heroes, so I still had to earn both by playing, although gems can be exchanged for crowns.
• When I bought three packs back to back in the same panel, the close button in its corner stopped responding. Closing and reopening the game fixed it, and neither the gems nor my progress were lost.

After a full session, the good and the bad

The first good thing is the pacing, which is very easygoing. A monster wave lasts just fifteen seconds, and a full run fits into a few minutes. Since you don't have to aim, playing one-handed while lying down works perfectly well.

The art is rounded and cartoonish with bright colours, and the bright green monsters look cute rather than scary, so kids can happily watch along. The merge rule is deep enough that you actually have to weigh your options rather than just tap through the waves.

The clearest downside is still the ads, because their banner clings to the bottom for almost the whole session and every so often jumps up to cover nearly half the screen, unless you claim ADS Remove through the mod. The best reward of each run is also locked behind a video.

The settings are bare, just two switches for music and sound with no language option, but there's very little text and the pictures make most things obvious. On its store page, the game holds 4.4 stars from more than 2,255 ratings and has passed 100 thousand downloads.

One more thing I have to say plainly, because it affects whether you should download it. On phones running Android 13 or later, Backpack Attack closes itself on the loading screen, eight times out of eight attempts.

The original version installed straight from the app store closes in exactly the same way, so the fault lies with the game itself, not with VipMod. On an Android 9 phone I played for hours on end without a single crash.

So who should download it

If you like auto-battlers where all the thinking goes into the preparation, packing items into slots and then watching how it plays out, this is a relaxed choice, and the game also plays completely offline.

I cut off the network entirely and played a full run, from packing items and fighting every wave to reviving. The rewards still came in full and the map screen opened as usual, with the bonus that no ads could butt in anymore.

And if you quit at exactly the spot I described at the start, falling on the last wave and staring at the 25-gem price with only 10 in your wallet, the mod removes exactly that obstacle. With a stash of gems, every run lasts much longer and you get deeper into the map. Purple crowns pile up faster too, bringing your second hero within reach.