Bulletstorm: Zombie FPS TD

I opened Bulletstorm: Zombie FPS TD thinking it was a zombie shooter for killing time. Play for five minutes, then quit, so in the very first level I was leisurely admiring the leaning cooling tower in the distance. Less than a minute later, my thousand-point health bar hit zero. The defeat screen came up in the middle of the very first wave, while my kill counter still sat at a perfectly round zero.

What stopped me wasn't losing, but realising the game gives you no gentle warm-up at all. From wave one of map one, zombies pour in from both flanks instead of lining up and walking straight down the middle. Meanwhile you're nailed to one spot behind an orange roadblock.

Standing still behind the barricade, a gun in each hand

The game's loop is so tight it takes one sentence to describe. You're a gunner holding a single spot, keeping your finger on the screen to fire continuously and dragging sideways to sweep your barrels from the left flank to the right. There's no movement button and no second piece of cover, so all the skill lies in how quickly you split your fire between the two sides.

Before each battle the game has you draw two guns from four random cards. Those four cards show their stats, so you get to choose rather than guess. The AK-47 deals 39 damage per bullet at a 0.2-second fire interval, while the MP5 drops to 35 but fires every 0.05 seconds. The AWP hits for a full 200 per shot, but only fires once every second and a half.

The two guns you pick sit in your two hands and fire at the same time. Pulling the trigger feels great as a result, even though the graphics are blocky low poly. Each map has five waves and you have to survive all five to clear it. Wave one alone took me more than a dozen zombie kills, so don't let the number five fool you into thinking battles are short.

Fifty-eight guns, and the seven you actually own

Leave a battle and you reach the gun locker, and this is where the game lays out its full ambition. The armory holds exactly 58 guns in five classes: AR, SMG, SR, SG and HG. My new account had seven unlocked; the rest sat behind a question mark or a padlock.

There are two ways to make a gun stronger: upgrade it with gold, or raise its star rank. Starring up needs parts for that specific gun class, and every tier demands a round hundred of them. Parts drop from gun chests, or you can buy them from a mystery stall that refreshes every twelve hours. At that stall, a bundle of five AK-47 parts sells for fifteen diamonds, while thirty parts of a rarer kind go for as much as ninety.

A few guns can't be reached through parts at all. The three-star frost AWP that caught my eye most shows just one button in the lower corner, reading $4.99 next to the word Unlock. In other words, it isn't part of the grind at all; it sits straight on the price list.

Talents are rolled with gold, and the price climbs fast

Next to the gun locker there's a talent board with thirteen slots. They include base health, damage for each gun class, and damage for each type of ammo, such as explosive, fire, electric or poison rounds. Each spin offers three cards to choose from, and every card adds twenty points to one slot.

My first spin cost 500 gold, which felt very reasonable. But the price rises with every spin, and after about twenty-five spins it had jumped to 6,500 gold, thirteen times the starting price. The shop tells you exactly what that gold is worth. Fifteen thousand gold costs a hundred diamonds, and diamonds are something you have to pay real money for.

The rewards are real, not just for show: after all those spins my base health had gone from 1,000 to 1,600. The AK-47 jumped from 39 damage to 70, and the AWP from 200 to 280. Battles felt completely different, but I still wasn't tough enough to make it through all five waves.

Where the game hands you the bill

The Bulletstorm: Zombie FPS TD shop is laid out very bluntly: if you want to go faster, you pay. The three diamond packs are 500 diamonds for $1.99, 2,000 for $4.99 and 6,000 for $9.99.

But the best seller is surely the VIP pack, which gathers almost every annoyance into one place and sells you the cure. VIP removes all ads, hands out a hundred diamonds a day and stretches the offline earnings window to twenty-four hours. It also gives you one revive after you fall, plus one extra gun-card swap and one shop refresh per battle. The thirty-day version costs $3.99 and the permanent one $6.99.

Below that sit two gun chests, a regular one and a premium one that guarantees a gun within twenty tries. The premium chest costs 200 diamonds, which means that without paying you'd need almost two days of VIP gifts to open a single one, and that chest is the main source of parts for starring up.

The mod removes exactly that money button

This game's mod has a single option called Free pack purchases, and it comes with the VipMod VIP plan, so it waits for you to switch it on rather than running by itself. Open the game from inside VipMod, tap the red MOD tile on the left edge of the screen and flip the switch on; after that, just go to the Shop and buy as usual.

My test went through four different kinds of pack rather than stopping at one. The $1.99 500-diamond pack took my balance from 1 to 501, along with the game's own reward screen. The thirty-day VIP and permanent VIP packs both went straight to my account. And the $4.99 frost AWP brought up the congratulations screen for a new weapon, then took the top spot in my gun locker right after.

Most importantly, those diamonds really spend. I took my 501 diamonds and bought a gun chest for 50, getting five upgrade parts, and the balance dropped to 451 exactly as the subtraction says. The next three hundred turned into 45,000 gold for talent spins. After fully closing and reopening the game, the diamonds, the gun and the VIP status were all still there.

Three things to know up front so you don't expect the wrong thing. First, the double-bonus promo label isn't honoured: a pack marked 500 x 2 still gives back exactly 500 diamonds. Second, everything you receive lives on the device rather than on any Google account, so uninstalling and reinstalling the game wipes it all.

Third, VIP status removes all ads, so the reward buttons you'd normally trade an ad video for disappear too. On the other hand, when we tapped the free gun chest it handed out its reward straight away without asking us to watch anything.

How does it feel to play?

What I like most is that the game runs fully without a connection. We cut the network completely and reopened it; our old progress was all still there and battles still spawned the full number of zombies. The shop and the talent board both kept working normally, and the only things missing were a few event panels with countdown timers. For a shooter that takes up nearly a hundred and eighty megabytes, that's a big plus on long flights.

My criticism is the difficulty curve right at the start. A pick-up-and-play game that makes newcomers lose three or four times in a row on the very first wave is a bit harsh. It's harsher still because the defeat screen doesn't offer you a revive, it kicks you straight back to the lobby. The blocky graphics are merely good enough, and on the sound side the gunfire is done much better than the background music.

Localisation is generous: Settings offers twenty-two languages, and the translation I checked covered everything from gun names and talent names to the VIP perks screen. The same settings panel also has a screen orientation switch, three graphics quality levels and a battery saver mode locked to thirty frames per second.

On Google Play, the game holds 4.8 stars from more than fourteen thousand ratings. Downloads have passed one hundred thousand, and the latest update came out at the end of July. Those are strong numbers for a quick-fire zombie game. My impression is that most of the goodwill comes from the feel of pulling the trigger, not from the gun-raising system.

So who should download it

If you're after a compact shooter to open for five or ten minutes while you wait, Bulletstorm: Zombie FPS TD fits the bill. It needs no story and no friends to play with; you get into a battle quickly, there's no account login, and it even plays with the network off. And there's always a clear goal ahead of you: unlocking one more of those fifty-eight guns.

And if you installed this game before and gave up, the likely reason was that the gun you wanted sat behind a dollar price tag. Or that the VIP pack bundled every convenience into one place, and the mod here removes exactly that button for you. Once things are unlocked, the rest is still the original game, and you still have to sweep your barrels across both flanks yourself; the only difference is that you start with a locker that regular players have to pay for.