Contra Guns: PvP Shooting FPS

I opened Contra Guns expecting a quick mobile shooter to kill some time. Three minutes into my first match, I was staring at a kill card telling me an enemy's radio car had got me. I hadn't seen the little toy coming at all. That first Team Deathmatch on the Helios map ended in a loss, and it taught me most of what I needed to know about how this game works.

Four minutes, forty kills, and a radio car I never saw

A match drops you into a team fight with real players from all over the world. My kill feed was a mix of Latin, Cyrillic and Chinese nicknames. Team Deathmatch runs for four minutes or until one side reaches 40 kills, and the second mode I landed in, Point Capture, is a race to 300 points by holding marked spots on the map.

Before you spawn, the game shows your whole kit on one screen. You get a slot each for an assault rifle, a shotgun, a sniper rifle, a handgun and a knife, plus grenades, two pieces of armor and two killstreak rewards called Radar and Turret. You tap Battle, and a few seconds later you're running through narrow streets and courtyards with your squad.

Simplified controls pull the trigger for you

The default setting is called Simplified controls, and it fires on its own whenever your crosshair rests on an enemy. That means your thumbs only have to steer and aim. Honestly, it's the only reason I scored anything in my first match.

If you'd rather shoot yourself, Advanced controls in the settings switch to holding a fire button. There's also a toggle for whether the scope works on a press or a hold.

The radar in the top-left corner is where you get most of your information. Out of the box it shows a close-up of the rooms around you and your teammates as blue dots, while the enemy team stays hidden most of the time. The two killstreak buttons on the right light up once you've done enough in the match. The Radar one is the game's own way of revealing the other side for a few seconds.

Every gun has thirty levels, and you'll see the upgrade screen a lot

Each time I tapped Battle from the lobby, the game first showed me an upgrade screen for one of my weapons. My Kriss Vector started at level 1 out of 30 with 25 damage. One upgrade took it to 27 for 800 credits, or instantly for 80 gold. I paid credits twice and it reached 29 damage, and the next time around the game offered the same deal for the Steyr Scout sniper rifle.

Armor works the same way. When that radio car took me out, the kill card showed the other player's boots and vest at level 6 out of 30, while mine were still sitting at level 1. In a game that matches you against real people, those levels are the gap you're always trying to close.

Thirty days of crates and a piggy bank full of gold

Outside matches, the first thing you see every day is a 30-day login calendar. Day four on my account was a Smuggler's Crate with 840 credits and ten blueprints each for a Glock-18 and a Saiga-12 shotgun. The later boxes in the calendar show bigger crates, an AK-74U and a couple of outfits.

There's also a Money Box, a winged piggy bank that collects a little gold from every match you play. Mine sat at 337 out of 1,000 gold with three days left on its timer. Opening it costs real money, which is a clever way of pulling you toward the shop. The lobby also had achievements to claim and a daily task that paid 400 credits for upgrading a weapon twice.

About 70 credits for a loss, and 800 for one upgrade

Here's the math that shaped my whole session. A lost match paid me 70 credits, one ticket and 100 XP. The first upgrades on my rifle cost 800 credits each, so one weapon level is worth roughly eleven losses.

The video at the end of a match doubles that payout. Even at 140 credits, though, you're looking at six matches per level on a gun with thirty levels, and four more weapons are waiting behind it.

The shortcut is gold. In the bank, 100 gold buys 1,000 credits and 5,000 gold buys 65,000 credits. Gold itself comes in real-money packs, and Google Play lists in-app purchases from $0.99 to $99.99 per item. Right after I leveled up, the game also pushed an Opening Kit with an AK-47, a crate and 400 gold, labeled "750% profit" with a countdown of under seven hours.

Ads are the free route, and they aren't short. The end-of-match video I watched was a full-screen app ad that ran for well over thirty seconds before I could close it. After that, the doubled credits did land in my balance. The bank also has a small free gold gift, which gave me 10 gold the first time and asked for a video for the next 25.

What the mod changes on your radar

The VipMod version installs the game at version 1.45 and keeps it there, because newer updates shut the mod out. You open the game from VipMod and tap the red VIP button on the left edge of the screen to bring up the MOD menu. Then you flip the options you want. The two radar options only kick in after you tap the restart button inside that menu.

With Radar shows every enemy turned on, my radar filled with pink dots for the enemy team next to the blue dots of my own squad. They stayed there the whole match. When I switched it off and played another round on the same map, the pink dots were gone and the radar went back to showing only my side.

The zoomed-out radar draws the map smaller inside the same frame. At the default size of 400, I could see most of Helios instead of the two or three rooms around me.

A few things to know up front:

• The ad option isn't working right now. Take x2 finished in about three seconds and the screen said +140 credits. After I restarted the game, my balance had only grown by the usual 70, and the 25-gold video gift didn't respond at all.
• To get the real double reward, I had to switch that option off and sit through the ad. That's when the full 140 credits arrived.
• The radar doesn't aim for you, doesn't add damage and doesn't make you tougher, so players with level 6 armor still win the straight fights.
• Nobody else can see your radar, but people do notice when you always turn toward them before they appear. This is a game where players report each other.

How it played on my phone

The good part is that it feels like a real shooter on a small screen. Helios is bright and packed with arches, balconies and crates to duck behind, and a match is short enough for a coffee break. Auto-fire makes it playable even if you've never handled twin sticks before. Both of my matches were full of real players and started without a long wait.

The weaker part is everything around the matches. The lobby is crowded with claim buttons, offers and timers, and the upgrade screen greets you before nearly every match. The jump from my level 1 gear to the level 6 gear that beat me is all grinding or paying.

Contra Guns holds 4.5 stars from about 4,400 reviews on Google Play with more than 500,000 downloads, and it's rated Teen. It comes in 17 languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Hindi.

So who should download it

If you want a quick team shooter against real people, with cartoonish maps and controls that don't punish beginners, this one is easy to pick up. The radar options give you a real head start on knowing where the fight is. Still, I'd play on a spare account first, since other players can report anyone who seems to know a little too much.

Maybe you already tried it and quit because every gun upgrade felt eleven lost matches away. The mod doesn't fix that math today, because the ad doubling isn't sticking. What it does give you is information, and in a four-minute match, knowing where the other team is standing often matters more than a couple of extra points of damage.