Bowmasters: Archery Shooting

One of the first matches Bowmasters sets up for you puts a bearded guy in a sweatband and an 808 tank top on a city sidewalk, facing a blue shark. The shark isn't even on screen yet. All you see is its little face on the right edge with the number 32 next to it, and then it's your turn to throw.

What made me stop, though, was the Heroes roster. Almost every portrait had a padlock on it, the whole Superhero Pack row included, and a VIP Pack popup was asking $24.99 for 22 VIP heroes with a timer counting down from nearly eight hours.

So I played it through VipMod with Free Shopping and Unlock All Heroes switched on, and I tried One Hit Kill and God Mode along the way. Below is how a duel works, where the game reaches for your wallet, what the mod really changes and where it comes up short.

Drag back, let go, and aim for the head

Every match is a duel between two heroes standing on a long city street, and you take turns. On yours, you drag back on the screen to set the power and the angle, a short dotted line and a power percentage give you a rough idea of where the shot will go, and then you let go.

Both health bars run across the top of the screen. A hit to the body takes a chunk off, while a hit to the head counts as a headshot, which is what you're really fishing for. The enemy often stands too far away to fit on screen, so that small tag on the right edge keeps track of how far off they are.

The ending is the part that surprised me. Draining the enemy's bar to zero doesn't finish the match: the game calls for a finishing shot, and only when that one lands do you get the Victory screen and a treasure chest. A win against the shark paid 175 coins, and another one paid 550.

A trickster god with a Frozen Spear

Every hero comes with a name, a title and exactly one weapon, and the weapon pretty much is the character. Ice Lord, billed as a trickster god, throws a Frozen Spear. The bearded guy from that early match shoots arrows, Julius throws a spear, and the rest of the roster brings knives, propellers and other odd things to throw.

The opponents get the same treatment. Zeus showed up with a crown and a white beard to face my Ice Lord, and the roster screen reads like a costume party, with a Superhero Pack full of capes and armor you'll recognize at a glance next to Professions, Sport and American Dream packs.

Since the controls never change, the roster is where all the variety lives. That's exactly why it matters so much that the game keeps most of it locked away.

Wins, videos or cash for every padlock

The Heroes roster is split into packs, and a padlock comes off in one of three ways: you win a set number of matches, you watch a video, or you pay. The main menu keeps a wins counter with a lock icon so you always know how close the next free hero is.

Around that sit the usual extra layers, with hero upgrades, a season pass and chests from your wins. None of it is complicated, but it all feeds the same small loop of playing a duel, opening the chest and checking how far away the next unlock still is.

$24.99 for 22 VIP heroes, with a countdown

The Shop has four tabs: Special Offers, Tickets, Coins and Gems. Coins go from 2,000 for $1.99 up to 200,000 for $99.99, gems from 100 for $1.99 up to 5,000 for $45.99, and tickets from 10 for $3.99 up to 120 for $29.99. On Google Play in the US, a single item costs anywhere from $0.29 to $99.99.

Tickets are the odd one out. After a match, the +50% bonus on your reward normally means sitting through a video, and spending a ticket gets you the same bonus without the video.

The real pressure comes from the popups. The VIP Pack offers all 22 VIP heroes for $24.99, crossed out from $44.99, with a badge that calls it 44% free and a countdown that read 7:52:53 when I opened it. Then there's VIP Club, a subscription that adds 14 characters, removes ads while keeping reward videos, and hands out 100 gems and 1,000 coins every day.

Without that subscription, the game also slips ads in between matches. You can absolutely play for free, but the roster fills up slowly, and a big share of it, including every hero with a VIP tag, sits behind one pack or another.

Four switches and a Run button

In VipMod, a red VIP button sits on the left side of the game screen and opens the MOD menu. God Mode and One Hit Kill are plain on and off switches, Free Shopping is a switch with a small reload icon next to it, and Unlock All Heroes lives in its own Run once box. All four need VIP 1.

I started with Free Shopping, since it wants the game to reload. I switched it on, tapped Restart to apply changes, then opened the Coins tab with 800 coins and bought the $99.99 pack. My balance jumped to 200,800 with no payment screen at all, and the $45.99 gem pack took my gems from 0 to 5,000 the same way.

Unlock All Heroes is a one-time button. I tapped Run, confirmed the Sure? prompt and got a Done, and when I opened the Heroes roster again every padlock was gone, VIP heroes and the Superhero Pack included. I picked Julius, took him into a match and won, and after closing and reopening the game the whole roster was still open.

One Hit Kill does what the name says. Against the shark, a single arrow emptied its bar, and later one spear from Julius did the same to his opponent. You still have to land the finishing shot, but after that it's straight to the chest, and the win against the shark nudged my coins up to 200,975.

God Mode is the switch I can say the least about. In one match Zeus's shot caught my Ice Lord in the body and my health bar stayed full, and on another run an enemy archer put an arrow into Julius's head with the same result. That's a couple of hits rather than a long evening, so I'd treat it as a nice extra, not the reason to install.

A few things to know up front:

• Switch Free Shopping on before you visit the Shop and let the game reload, because a Buy button pressed without it only spins.
• One Hit Kill empties the bar, but the match won't end until your finishing shot connects.
• VIP Club shows as active, and I didn't get a single ad between matches, but its daily gems and coins aren't part of the deal.
• Unlocked heroes stay unlocked for good, and the wins counter on the main menu keeps drawing its lock even with the roster wide open.

Two throws a match gets old, the roster doesn't

With One Hit Kill on, a match is basically two throws, one to empty the bar and one to finish. That's handy for collecting chests fast, but it also takes the tension out of the aiming, which is the best part of the game, so I'd leave it off whenever you want a real duel.

Unlock All Heroes is the switch I'd keep on forever. Half the fun here is finding out how a new weapon feels in your hand, and having the whole roster open means you can go from Ice Lord's spear to anything in the VIP row without grinding wins or watching videos first.

The weak spots belong to the game itself. Every match I played took place on the same kind of city street, so long sessions can start to blur together. Without VIP Club you also get ads between matches, which hurts a game built on quick duels.

It still plays with the internet off

I cut the internet off for the game to see what would break, and nothing did. It opened, a match started, and the mod still loaded with all its switches, so a quick duel on a plane or in a subway tunnel is no problem.

There's no language option inside the game. It simply follows your phone's language, and with the phone set to English every screen, from the Shop to the roster, came up in English.

On Google Play in the US the game holds 4.3 stars from about 809,000 ratings, with more than 100 million downloads and a Teen rating, and the listing warns about both ads and in-app purchases. Its last update there landed on October 9, 2026.

Who should pick up the bow

If you like short turn-based duels where one good throw decides the whole thing, this is a quick, silly game to keep on your phone, and it doesn't need a connection. The aiming takes a few matches to get a feel for, and a clean headshot stays satisfying long after that.

And if you once opened the Heroes roster, saw a wall of padlocks next to a $24.99 VIP Pack and closed the game, the mod goes straight at that. With every hero open and the Shop free, you get to spend your time on the throws instead of on the wins counter.