Kingdom Rush Tower Defense TD

Kingdom Rush is a name every tower defense fan has heard, so I installed it feeling a little cocky, assuming the first few levels would just be a warm-up. Southport, the opening level, hands you exactly 265 gold and a road with far more empty building plots than you can afford towers for.

I put up an archer tower for 70 gold and a barracks for another 70, which left 125 in my pocket. By the third wave I wanted a dwarven artillery tower, and it costs exactly 125, so building it meant having not a single coin left to upgrade anything.

The seventh wave broke through, all twenty lives were gone, and the game opened a defeat screen with a big button inviting me to go buy items. That is where it stung, because I didn't lose for putting towers in the wrong place. I lost because for the first three minutes the game only gives you enough money for two towers.

How a level plays out, starting from 265 gold

Every level is a winding road, and Vez'Nan's army marches from one end to the other. Your job is to put towers on the empty plots along both sides. At the top of the screen you have your lives, your gold and the wave counter: Southport has seven waves, for example, while Pagras already goes up to eleven.

Kingdom Rush's four basic towers split into four clear roles. The 70-gold archer tower has the longest reach and is the cheapest, while the barracks also costs 70 but, instead of shooting, sends out three soldiers to block the road. The 100-gold mage tower specializes in armored enemies, and the 125-gold dwarven artillery fires very slowly but blasts a whole area.

The barracks is my favorite, because it doesn't kill fast but it holds enemies in place. Anything running down the road stops to fight the soldiers on the spot, and while they're busy, the towers behind them get free shots at their backs.

You don't have to wait for each wave to arrive on its own, either. Tap the skull at the edge of the screen and the next wave comes early, and in exchange you get a little bonus gold. Experienced players call waves back to back to bank money and build faster.

Three things that save you when your towers can't keep up

After a few waves the game unlocks two more buttons in the bottom-left corner. The first calls reinforcements, two soldiers who appear right where you point. It is completely free; you only wait a short moment before you can call the next pair.

The second is Rain of Fire, a meteor shower dropped straight onto the area you pick. It hits hard, but the wait between uses is very long. After a few levels you learn on your own to save it for the moments that really matter.

The third is items bought with gems, each one gone after a single use. The cheapest is a bundle of dynamite for 50 gems, while the strongest gunpowder barrel costs 999. That second figure is close to every gem you'll earn across seven or eight levels in a row.

Stars for upgrades, gems for items, and a locked hero room

Back on the campaign map you'll see two numbers side by side in the top corner. One is gems and the other is stars, and they are spent in completely different places, so don't mix them up.

You earn stars by winning levels: a clean win gives three stars, a scrappy one only one or two. The whole campaign adds up to 130 stars. You take them to the upgrade screen to permanently unlock stronger branches for each tower type, for reinforcements and for Rain of Fire.

Gems drop from enemies and from the reward chest at the end of a level, and I picked up somewhere between sixty and a little over a hundred per level. They pay for the single-use items in the shop, which is where the game will keep steering you.

The hero room, home to the 13 heroes the game advertises, is where it is most upfront about money. The first three heroes unlock as you progress; Sir Gerald Lightseeker, for instance, plainly says he unlocks at level 4. Every hero after that carries a buy button of its own, because they belong to the paid group.

This is where the game starts squeezing you

Losing a level costs you no lives and no plays, and there's no timer to wait out like in so many games these days. Instead the game immediately shows how many gems you just picked up, along with a button that leads straight to the item shop.

One look at the shop's price list explains why it invites you in at exactly that moment. A heart that restores lives costs 350 gems, an ice orb 250, a sack of gold 850 and the strongest gunpowder barrel 999. Meanwhile a full win only brings home about 70 to 130 gems.

So to buy a single gunpowder barrel, you have to clear eight to ten levels and spend nothing else along the way. Unlocking one of the paid heroes is a far bigger ask still, and heroes are the thing that changes how you play the most.

The shortcut is laid out for you in three gem packs of 1,500, 2,500 and 6,000. On the US Google Play store, the game's in-app purchases run from $0.99 to $99.99 per item. The only free way to earn gems I found was watching an ad for 100 of them.

The mod fixes exactly those three sore spots

Once the game is installed through VipMod, you'll see a red MOD button tucked against the left edge of the screen while you play. Tap it and the feature panel opens with four rows. The first row is the loader, so leave it switched on.

The second row is in-battle gold. Before turning it on, I started Southport with the same 265 gold as everyone else. After switching it on and going back in, the gold bar read 99,999 from the very first second of the level.

What matters is that you can actually spend it, not just admire it on the bar. I built four artillery towers in a row for 500 gold, then went to Pagras and filled all nine empty plots. I upgraded most of them to tier two at 220 a pop, and the gold bar never moved from the level I'd chosen.

The third row is battle speed, from ×2 up to ×6. To keep it fair, I tested it again and again on the same level, The Farmlands. At normal speed the first wave took forty seconds; at ×4 I was already on the third wave after twenty-five seconds, and the whole seven-wave level was over in about a minute and a half.

The last row is gems: pick 5,000, 50,000 or 999,999. My profile had 68 gems at the time; I chose 50,000, opened the map, and a few seconds later the number had changed. To be sure they could really be spent, I went into the shop and bought the 999-gem gunpowder barrel.

The game confirmed the purchase, the item sat neatly in the item bar on the left, and the balance dropped to 49,001 before refilling itself in under ten seconds. Only then was I willing to say this mod works, because a big number on the screen proves nothing on its own.

A few things worth knowing up front, so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• On my very first session the gold bar still showed 265. I had to close the game and come back in before it jumped to 99,999, and from then on it was there every time.
• On level one, tapping to upgrade a tower showed a padlock instead of a price. It only opened after I won that level, which means tower tiers follow your progress, not your wallet.
• I went back to the hero room holding more than fifty thousand gems and it was just as locked as before, because those heroes are sold for real money, not gems.
• That hero buy button also shows a question mark instead of a price. Tapping it freezes the game on the loading screen until you quit and come back, so it's best left alone.
• Once I turned on ×4 and let a level run without building a single tower. When I came back I had lost long before, because the enemies speed up by exactly the same amount.

How it feels after a real session

Kingdom Rush's biggest strength is that it doesn't make you stay online. I turned on airplane mode and launched the game from a full stop. I played all eleven waves of Pagras, won, and still collected the full 129 gems without the game asking for a connection even once.

The hand-drawn cartoon art still has a lot of charm, even though the game is many years old. The sound is clean, with a distinct firing sound for each tower type, so you can tell which one is shooting just by listening. Crowded levels still ran smoothly on my phone, even with the speed-up on.

Language is no barrier either: the settings list ten languages, and most of the on-screen text is tower names anyway. My only real complaint is that the real-money gem store doesn't open when you play inside VipMod, where the gem packs show a question mark instead of a price. To be fair, with this mod you have no reason left to tap there.

On Google Play, Kingdom Rush holds 4.7 stars from more than 850,000 reviews and has passed 10 million downloads. That's a rare tally for a tower defense game that has been out for this long.

So who should download it

If you're looking for a strategy game to dip into while you wait for the bus or for dinner, this is an easy pick. Each level wraps up in a few minutes, it needs no connection, and there are no events nagging you to open it every day. The fun is in figuring out where to put your towers, not in how fast you can tap.

And if you downloaded Kingdom Rush before and dropped it somewhere around the fourth or fifth level because you had to replay a stage five or seven times to scrape together enough gold, this mod fixes exactly that. Gold is no longer something you count coin by coin, and the speed-up cuts out the time spent watching enemies walk. You'll also have enough gems to try every item you never dared to buy before.