Harvest King: Farm TD Strategy

I opened Harvest King picturing a laid-back farming game: sow the seeds, wait for the veggies to grow, tap to harvest, nothing stressful. That picture fell apart right after the tutorial, when a farmer with a pitchfork marched straight down onto the bed of vegetables I had just planted.

The first two levels flew by thanks to some sword-wielding tomatoes. On my third run I ground to a halt, and what stopped me wasn't a boss at all.

Each round plays out on an eight-slice wheel

Your garden is a circle split into eight slices. In the middle, a few wooden arms rotate to water each slice in turn, and at the bottom of the screen is a two-slot stall that offers you two different plants each turn.

Your job is to drag them into an empty slice and watch them grow. Plants the arms water grow faster, and growing faster means they spawn soldiers faster. Those veggie soldiers march up the dirt road on their own to stop the farmers.

Stack two identical plants and they merge into a higher-level one, and that's where most of your thinking goes. Spread them out to fill the garden, or pile them up for one really strong plant? You have to answer that again after every wave, because the stall never offers exactly what you need.

An all-vegetable squad, and the strongest one came out of a seed pack

Your first unit is Boomato, a melee tomato that hits hard but can't take much punishment. After the first level the game gave me Broc Hood, a broccoli archer that shoots from range with ten attack and ten HP, its card clearly marked as a support.

The surprise was that the strongest unit I had at that point didn't come from playing well. It dropped out of a seed pack: Carrotus, a one-eyed carrot with a sword, twenty damage and thirty HP. The card cabinet still has dozens of dark slots, split into three roles: tank, damage and support.

Making a plant stronger takes two things at once: enough duplicate cards and enough seed tokens. Taking Broc Hood from level one to two cost me fifty tokens and raised each stat by exactly two points, and the next level already costs double, a hundred.

Four waves, then five, and the last one always has a skull

The opening level has only four waves, the second already five, and the last wave always carries a little skull in the top corner. That's the sign a boss is coming, so you get one last chance to rearrange the garden. The boss here is a green harvester carrying a guy who throws dynamite into your garden.

The boss fight is when the whole garden shows what it's for, with your veggie soldiers streaming up in a long line while the watering arms keep spinning behind them. Win, and the game names one plant the star of the match and hands you a seed pack.

Lose, and you're still rewarded for the wave milestones you passed, which I found quite decent. The progress bar has three milestones, you get the pack for each one you reach, and the energy you spent on the failed run is refunded in full.

Outside battle: a map and a card cabinet

Outside the levels, Harvest King has a chapter map set in a garden in open revolt. Numbered nodes are linked by trails, with the occasional side branch holding its own reward. Before a battle you choose five plants to bring, plus a separate tab for choosing the type of watering arm.

Seed packs are what expand that cabinet. They come in clearly separated tiers: Common, Epic, Legendary and Mythic. The higher the tier, the more cards, tokens and tools drop out, and the Mythic pack states outright that it guarantees a Legendary-tier plant.

Two other big sections were still locked when I stopped: one called the Garden opens at level fourteen, and a game-modes section at level fifteen. Seeing how the game hangs those two padlocks right on the main screen, it's clear they want you to grind your way up to them.

Where the game starts squeezing you

Each battle costs three energy, a full bar is thirty, and one point takes about seven or eight minutes to come back. Play nonstop and you're out after about ten runs; after that you either wait a few hours or open your wallet.

Inside a battle there's a separate valve: gold. Rerolling the stall costs six gold the first time and immediately jumps to twelve, while opening an extra slice of land costs two. Each wave you win only brings in about six, so you're always short.

Outside battle, everything comes down to gems, a currency the game sells but doesn't give away. A hundred gems buy a thousand tokens, while plant upgrade costs double with every level. The gem shop runs from a pack under a dollar to one close to a hundred dollars.

The game also actively reminds you to spend instead of waiting for you to think of it. Once, when I tapped to fight, it stopped me and said I still had coins, so I should try rerolling the stall first.

The mod opens the very button you keep tapping in vain

Once installed, you'll see a red MOD button floating on the left edge of the screen. Tap it to open the menu, which has exactly one option: Free paid packs. To be fair, I tried with the switch off first: tapping the 1.99 button on the offer pack that pops up after a loss did absolutely nothing.

Switch it on and tap that same button again, and everything changes: the game shows "received" and instantly hands over a Legendary seed pack, ten thousand tokens and five hundred tools. Tap again and you get it again, so this isn't a one-time trick.

I tried it at the two other sales points and both delivered: the ad removal pack, priced at almost ten dollars, returned a thousand gems plus a few ad-free cards, and the cheapest gem pack returned a hundred and ten gems thanks to the first-purchase bonus.

By the end of one session, my wallet had gone from empty to more than twenty-one thousand tokens, thirteen hundred tools and eleven hundred gems. What matters more than the numbers is whether they can be spent, so I took exactly the thousand gems I'd just received, swapped them for the Mythic Pack and opened Frostberry, a brand-new Legendary-tier plant.

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

• The mod only touches packs paid for with real money; whatever the game sells for gems still costs gems as usual.
• Packs the game itself limits per day, such as the Mythic pack capped at five purchases, keep that limit.
• The menu has just this one option. There's no unlimited gold or god mode, so don't waste time looking for them.

How it plays

What I like most is the rounded shapes and bright colors, which you can look at for an hour without your eyes getting tired, and every vegetable has its own fighting style, so every battle is fun. Settings also has a language option.

What I don't like is the slow pace, most noticeable in the early waves when the garden has just one or two plants and all you can do is watch. The speed button has three settings, but even the highest isn't fast enough, and dragging a plant into the garden sometimes misses so the plant snaps back to the stall.

On Google Play the game stands at 4.5 stars from more than sixteen thousand ratings and has passed a million downloads. That matches my feeling that the core is solidly made.

I also switched on airplane mode and relaunched from scratch to see whether the game needs a connection. It went straight to the map, played all five waves and still paid out the full rewards, so you can play it normally on a bus or a plane.

So who should download it

If you like tower defense but are tired of games that lay out a path and make you plant towers on both sides, the eight-slice wheel here is an unusual, easy-to-learn way to set up a defense. It doesn't need reflexes or a connection, and each round fits into five minutes or so, which makes it a good pick while you wait for something or before bed.

And if you installed Harvest King before and quit because you ran out of energy and had to wait, or because every loss came with a pack costing almost two dollars, the mod removes exactly that obstacle. Claim a few packs and you'll have the tokens and gems to raise your whole squad; the rest is still the original game, except you no longer get stopped halfway.