Dynasty Archer: Three Kingdoms

I went into Dynasty Archer with pretty low expectations: an archery game borrowing the Three Kingdoms name to be memorable, the kind you play for a few stages and drop. At level 3 the game opened the Advantage panel, nine hexagons all showing question marks, and told me straight out that every one I unlock permanently boosts my hero's stats.

The first step cost 300 Silver and I paid it right away. The next was 400, then 600, then 800. At the fifth step the number turned red at 1,000 Silver, while a full stage only earned me 48. From then on, everything in the game boiled down to one question: how are you going to collect all that Silver?

A stage is a chain of rooms, and you only shoot when you stand still

Every time you hit Battle, the game takes 5 energy and drops you into a square room seen from above. There's a virtual joystick in the left corner and no fire button at all. Your hero looses arrows on his own when you let go, so the whole skill of the game comes down to choosing when to run and when to stand your ground.

Yellow Turban troops pour out in waves, mixed with flocks of crows that fly diagonally across the screen and are very hard to dodge. The floor is dotted with puddles that slow you down exactly when you shouldn't be slowed. Clear a room and a purple portal opens at the edge of the map; step in to reach the next room, while the room counter ticks up in the top corner.

Between rooms, the game often slips in two unusual faces. A Master stands waiting to give you 90 extra max HP. The Emperor makes you choose between faster attacks and restoring some HP, and by the time you meet him you usually have just one sliver of HP left to think about.

Mid-battle level-ups: three cards and no safe choice

Kill enough troops and the in-battle XP bar fills, the screen pauses and you get three options. That time I could choose between Attack Speed Up, Rapid Fire and Poison Ring: two cards that add straight to your damage and one that sets up a ring of poison circling around you.

I took Poison Ring thinking it would clear the crows for me, and it did, but only the ones bold enough to come close. That's the kind of decision the game repeats a few times every stage. Everything you pick mid-battle vanishes when you die, so every card is both tempting and scary.

When you die there's no revive button, and no offer to pay to get back up either. The game just shows the floor where you fell and boasts that you beat 14% of players. Then it hands back the Silver you picked up on that run and invites you to watch an ad to double it.

Leaving the stage is when the game settles the bill

Back at headquarters, you see your current chapter laid out on a long strip. Here it's chapter one, the Yellow Turban Rebellion, with five chests hanging at stages 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50. That strip is what keeps you around the longest, because it always gives you a short goal to reach for after every loss.

The Heroes tab shows the stats of the general you're using. I started with Xiahou Yuan at 600 HP and 220 attack, surrounded by eight gear slots, the last two still locked. Next to it are Mounts to ride, a Collection to see what you've gathered, and a Forge for fusing odd items into better ones or breaking down spares.

The Advantage panel that opens at level 3 is the top layer, and the one where I lingered longest. Nine hexagons are split into three rows by rarity, and each upgrade draws one at random for you. One after another I flipped Blessing, Power, Steel Wall and then AFK Reward.

AFK Reward deserves a special mention, because it's the game's only steady income. It builds up about 2 Silver a minute for you, even with the phone off. I came back after thirteen minutes and collected just over thirty Silver, which tells you how long the road to 1,000 really is.

Energy, Gold, Silver and the real price of a pull

The game runs on two currencies and an energy tank. A full tank is 40 points and each stage run costs 5, so playing straight through until it's empty gets you only eight runs. At 48 Silver per run, a whole tank is worth less than 400 Silver.

Silver is what you use for Advantage upgrades and small things, while Gold is the currency the game really wants to sell. In the shop, 960 Silver goes for 30 Gold, and there's only one sure way to get Gold: tapping one of the six paid packs laid out in two rows.

Those six packs run from 80 Gold for $0.99 up to 14,000 Gold for $99.99. The most expensive item in the shop is the Diamond Chest x10 at 2,700 Gold, which guarantees at least one Legendary item in return. Put those two numbers together and a ten-pull sits between the $19.99 pack and the $49.99 pack, so more than twenty dollars for a single tap.

There's also the Monthly Card, a familiar sight in every game of this kind. It adds 10% to idle rewards, 20 to your energy cap and 10% to attack, and pays you 150 Gold a day for thirty days. The game also offers a lifetime version at $99.99 with 20,000 Gold, placed right under the regular one so you see it every time you open that panel.

The mod undoes exactly those three knots

Open the game in VipMod and there's a red MOD button in the left corner of the screen; tap it for four tidy switches. One freezes your balances, one lets upgrades go through without Upgrade Stones and Spirit Stones, and one handles the paid packs; those three belong to VIP 2. The last is Anti-report, part of VIP 1. Like every switch it starts off, so turn Anti-report on first, before flipping the others.

I tested the freeze switch right on the Advantage panel, where it's easy to see. My Silver stood at 980, and I tapped upgrade three times in a row at 400, 600 and then 800. After all three, the number was still exactly 980. Meanwhile Advantage reached level 4 and my hero's power jumped from 4,040 to 10,140.

To be fair, this lock works both ways, so while it's on, rewards can't flow into your wallet either. I lost all the Silver I picked up in one stage, plus that day's check-in gift. And once the upgrade price shot up to 1,000, the game still refused to sell, because it always checks your balance before letting you buy.

The paid-pack switch is far more straightforward. I tapped the $0.99 pack and got exactly 80 Gold, then the $19.99 pack and got 2,500 Gold. Neither time did a payment window appear, just the game's familiar Reward scroll.

To make sure that Gold could really be spent, I took 2,700 of it to open a Diamond Chest x10. All ten items came out, three bows plus some armor and boots, including exactly one orange-bordered helmet: the Legendary the game had promised. A Monthly Card I got the same way a few days earlier still had twenty-six days left, and today I still collected its full 150 Gold.

A few things to know up front so your expectations are right:

• Don't turn on the freeze together with the paid packs, because a pack's reward is also a currency gain, so it gets blocked too.
• Throughout my testing the game never once tried to report me to the server, so you won't see the Anti-report switch doing anything. On the plus side, turning it on doesn't make the game heavier or break any stage.
• Your profile lives on the publisher's server, not on your phone, so if you plan to use the paid-pack switch a lot, this is a game worth playing on a secondary account.

After a full session, here's what I think

What I like most is how the shooting feels. Your hero fires steadily, and there are just enough enemies that you have to keep circling instead of standing in one spot and taking everything. The skill cards picked mid-battle also differ enough that two runs in a row never play out the same.

Settings even has a proper language picker. On Google Play the game holds 4.7 stars from more than 14,000 ratings and has passed 100,000 downloads, solid numbers for a small game.

There are a few things to complain about. One event panel popped up with its heading still reading just "Title", and its countdown timer frozen. Worse, I once got stuck on a blank brown screen and had to close and reopen the game to get out.

The most annoying thing isn't a bug but a design choice: the forty-point energy tank chops your play time into chunks of eight runs. The game also requires a connection. When I cut the network it stopped dead at the login screen with nothing but a retry button, and I couldn't get into a single stage.

So who should play it

If you're looking for an archery game to pick up for five minutes whenever you're free, and you enjoy the roguelite rhythm of random skill picks, this is a pleasant choice. The Three Kingdoms setting is only an outer coat, but it's a nicely drawn one.

And if you installed this game once and gave up halfway, it was probably because you got stuck at an Advantage milestone, or because 2,700 Gold for one pull wore you down. The mod removes exactly that. You still play every stage yourself and still dodge every flock of crows; it's just that the money fence between you and the upgrade panel no longer stands in the way.