Caveman Survivor

I opened Caveman Survivor with fairly low expectations, as a laid-back shooter to kill ten minutes or so while waiting. The first few minutes really were relaxing: the hero shoots on his own, I just swiped left and right so the mount could dodge, and the giant worm in the top half of the screen lost one segment after another.

But at the thirty percent mark of the first level, the hero went down. The game offered exactly two choices: give up, or tap a revive button with a little video icon in the corner. Only then did I realise that the real currency here isn't gold, but how many minutes you're willing to sit through ads.

A level is one worm that fills half the screen

The loop is so compact you understand all of it in the first thirty seconds: your character sits on a shaggy beast at the bottom edge and fires arrows upwards completely automatically. Your only job is to swipe sideways and pick your spot carefully, because standing in the wrong place means the worm sweeps into you and your run is over.

The enemy isn't a pack of separate monsters but one single worm, terrifyingly long, coiling back and forth in layers that cover the whole top half of the screen. Every segment of its body has its own health bar, some a few hundred, some up to a million, and the segment wearing a crown is always the toughest nut to crack.

The percentage bar in the middle of the screen shows how much you've chewed through, and a few segments marked with a chest icon break open into rewards, so you have a reason to aim instead of firing blindly. Playing feels more like carving away at a long slab of meat than dodging bullets.

The top-left corner also has a speed button: tap it to run at one and a half times speed, then double speed, and luckily for players that button doesn't make you watch anything.

Three cards every level-up, and a reroll button with a video icon

Every few dozen seconds the game pauses to open the card picker. Each time you get three choices, sorted into four rarity tiers: Common, Rare, Epic and Legendary. There are two kinds of card: one summons a new companion to ride along on the beast's back, the other directly boosts the stats of a companion you already have.

This is where each run's build takes shape, so I grabbed several ice-arrow damage cards in a row, then a card that splits arrows when they hit. By the middle of the level, a single shot was tearing through three worm segments at once.

Right under the three cards are two buttons worth noting. One rerolls all three cards, while the other lays out the whole deck so you can choose for yourself. Both carry a video icon in the top-right corner, and you'll meet them again in the mod section below.

Eight heroes, and the first one you unlock may not be the one you keep

Outside the levels, the game gathers its characters into a roster of eight heroes. Their designs are more imaginative than I expected: a frost archer, a rolling log guardian, a love god who fires splitting arrows, a river lord holding a trident. There's even a swamp prophet wearing an entire frog's head.

Each hero levels up with their own shards rather than a shared resource, so it's hard to pour everything into one hero, however much you might want to. I took the frost archer to level two with five shards, raising damage from ten to twelve, and the next milestone immediately asked for fifteen shards.

In return, each level unlocks a new skill line that genuinely changes how they shoot instead of just adding percentages. Level one makes arrows split into three on impact, and level two doubles the arrow size. Later levels even add a chance to delete a worm segment outright, skipping its health bar entirely.

Energy is what really counts your playtime

The main screen shows three currencies at once, and the most important one is the one hardly anyone notices. Gold buys hero shards in the shop, and red gems buy chests and large shard bundles. Energy, meanwhile, decides how many runs you get.

The PLAY button clearly costs five energy, while the bar only holds thirty at most, which means a full account gets six runs in a row and then has to wait for it to refill. In a game where each run lasts a good ten minutes, that number runs out faster than you'd think.

There's also a free chest on a timer of about fifteen minutes. A few other tabs, such as mounts and events, stay locked until you clear a few more levels. This meta layer isn't deep, but it's enough to pull you back several times a day instead of grinding in one long session.

Where Caveman Survivor starts charging you in time

Add it all up and there are four doors leading to the same place, and every one of them carries a video icon. Reviving mid-level gets three uses, rerolling the three cards gets three, and swapping the whole hand gets two. The fourth door is a separate counter in the shop that trades each viewing for an ad-free ticket.

I tried the reroll button without the mod, and the timer that appeared said the reward would arrive in another twenty-five seconds, with the video already a little way in. All told, each viewing costs a full half minute.

Fail a few times in one level and you spend longer watching ads than shooting. The ticket counter isn't a way out either, because it's capped at ten a day and only refreshes after forty-odd minutes.

If you'd rather pay with money, the shell shop lines up packs from about one dollar to around a hundred dollars per item.

The mod cuts out exactly those thirty seconds

The game's MOD menu has just one line, called Ad rewards without watching. Turn it on, reopen the game and you're done; there are no sliders or sub-options to adjust. It doesn't add gold, doesn't add gems, and doesn't give you extra uses either.

I tried all four doors mentioned above, and when the hero fell at the thirty percent mark, tapping revive stood him back up on the spot. The battle carried on up to thirty-two percent without a single ad screen in between.

On the card picker, tapping reroll swapped the three cards instantly. The uses counter dropped from two to one, just as if I'd watched the whole video. The button that swaps the whole hand worked the same way: the card panel closed and the battle carried straight on.

It's clearest at the ticket counter in the shop. The counter went from ten out of ten to nine out of ten, and the reward panel popped out a ticket. The slot in the right corner of the screen changed from its not-activated label to the number one, meaning the item really landed in your bag rather than just flashing for show.

A few things to know up front so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• Your uses are still the game's uses: once the three revives are gone, they're gone, and the mod doesn't conjure up any more.
• The game requires an internet connection, so this option goes quiet along with it: I cut the network and reopened the game, and it sat on the loading screen for nearly two minutes and never got in.
• Turning the option on mid-game takes effect right away, but switching it on before you open the game is the safer bet.

What playing it is really like

What I like most is the art, because the scribbly hand-drawn style, like a children's colouring book, suits carving up a worm dozens of metres long surprisingly well. Every new hero has a design quirky enough that I wanted to try them right away.

The game is localised into several languages and the translation I played with was decent. Even so, a few strings slipped through untranslated; for example, one button in the dialog asking whether to use a ticket or watch an ad showed Indonesian text. That's the familiar small slip of a team shipping to many markets at once.

The real annoyance is the density of ads, plus the fact that the game insists on a connection even though nothing in its gameplay needs a server. On the Google Play listing I checked, the game had 4.6 stars from 763 ratings. Downloads were just over ten thousand, so it's still small rather than a name everyone knows.

Those numbers also explain why the game isn't as polished as similar titles with a wider release.

Who should download it

If you like games where you tap in and start shooting without learning any complicated system, this one fits the bill. It gives you the simple pleasure of damage numbers climbing notch by notch. A run lasts just long enough to play while dinner's cooking, and quitting halfway doesn't cost you much.

And if you downloaded Caveman Survivor before and deleted it because you were tired of the cycle of dying, watching an ad, then dying again, the thing that made you quit is exactly what the mod removes. The game itself stays intact, with all its uses and limits. You just no longer pay with those half-minutes of staring at the screen.