Survivor Kingdoms

I downloaded Survivor Kingdoms expecting yet another survivor.io clone, something to tap at for a few minutes and then delete. Chapter one held on to me a lot longer than I planned. Your hero shoots without you aiming, and your only job is to drag a finger around to dodge while scooping up the green gems that drop from dead monsters. It sounds relaxing, yet your hand stays busy for four straight minutes.

It wasn't until the first boss walked in that I understood where the game plans to make its money. My hero went down before the health bar could recover, the screen darkened and the game asked whether I wanted to revive. Right under the button to accept defeat sat a thirty-day no-ads pass for $12.99, marked 40 percent off.

Four minutes a chapter, with a clock always counting down to the boss

A run starts on an empty meadow with a few orcs shuffling toward you. In the middle of the screen a small clock counts down about two minutes, the deadline for the boss to show up. You steer your hero in circles, arrows fly out in every direction, and the monsters collapse into puddles of gems for you to run over.

Every time the experience bar fills, the battle pauses and the game offers three cards to pick from. Some add more projectiles, others unlock new skills such as a beam of light that sweeps across the screen or a pack of wolves charging straight into the crowd. The clock stands still while you decide, so a four-minute chapter actually lasts a good deal longer.

The closer you get to the end, the thicker the crowd. By minute three the screen is almost covered in black wolves and green orcs jostling each other, and the game still runs smoothly. That's my favorite part of this rhythm, because it gives you the feeling of holding off a sea of monsters on your own without any complicated controls.

The raging farmer is where I fell the first time

The chapter one boss is a farmer in a straw hat wielding a pitchfork. Behind him comes a flock of chickens that rush in fast and are very hard to dodge. I was running my usual circles, so the chickens cut me off, I took several pitchfork hits in a row and went down with the boss still above half health.

The game gives you one free revive, so I got back up, kept fighting and brought the boss down to about a third. Then I died a second time, and this time there was no button left to save me. The result screen showed a bright red defeat banner with 677 monsters killed, plus a bit of gold, a pair of gloves and five scrolls.

The nice part is that you still bring loot home when you lose, so the last five minutes don't feel wasted. The annoying part is elsewhere. Each chapter attempt costs five energy, while your energy tank only holds thirty.

Two bright heroes and seventeen dark silhouettes

Tap the start button and the hero selection screen appears, and that screen says a lot about the game. On a fresh install you only have a blue-armored knight with a shield. The rest are seventeen locked silhouettes, and you can scroll the whole screen without seeing them all.

The second hero is the Archer, and I got him quite early from the chapter one reward chest rather than buying him. The Archer shoots farther than the knight, so boss fights get noticeably easier. He's also the hero I used for every run after that.

The other silhouettes come another way: either you collect enough hero shards, or you buy them outright in limited three-day packs. Wukong sits in the cheapest pack, while the S-rank Valkyrie is in the $9.99 pack with two thousand gems. The game even slaps a 2400 percent value badge on that pack for good measure.

Outside battle there are artifacts, a blacksmith and an idle chest

Win or lose, you return to the main screen, where a whole second layer of the game is arranged around the start button. On the left are festivals and blessings counting down by the day, and on the right are quests and login rewards. At the very top is a Kingdom Pass bar running from 0 to 50 tiers.

The most interesting part is the artifact board in the last tab. It opens a long list of S- and SS-grade pieces with flashy names. You start with three equipment slots, but the third one is already locked and costs 250 gems to open.

There's also a chest of idle rewards that collects loot for you while the game is closed. It gathers 720 gold and 55 experience per hour, for up to twelve hours. I came back to the game after a good while away and collected more than eight thousand gold plus four chests, which tells you the game wants you to drop by every day.

Five energy per run, and 400 gems for one chest

Gold is easy to earn, since a few chapters bring in a few thousand, but gold only pays for small things. The currency that really matters is gems. The shop shows you why the first time you open it with a nice round balance of zero.

An S-grade equipment chest costs 400 gems for one pull and 3600 gems for ten. The premium chest is cheaper at 300 gems a pull, or you can watch an ad instead of paying. There's exactly one free chest a day, and it gave me a level 1 green armor piece, the lowest item on the table.

Gems don't drop from levels in any meaningful amount; twenty or thirty per boss kill is a lot. For a single S-grade chest pull you'd have to beat the boss about twenty times, and every chapter attempt eats five energy, so grinding on your own leads straight to the top-up page. On the US Google Play store, the game's purchases run from $0.49 to $89.99 per item.

The mod removes the two walls in your way

The Survivor Kingdoms MOD menu is compact, with just three rows and no scrolling. The red MOD button sits in the top-left corner as soon as the game reaches the main screen. Tap it and you'll see Free pack purchases, Invincible and Offline play.

Free pack purchases is the most valuable of the three. I flipped the switch and tapped the $0.99 button on the first top-up pack, and it instantly turned into Claim. Tapping again opened the reward panel with nine Wukong shards, two purple chests and a hundred thousand gold, and the gold counter at the top jumped from seven thousand to over a hundred thousand right in front of me.

What matters more is whether the gems you get can really be spent. So I also took the $1.99 pack for a thousand gems and went straight to the shop. One S-grade chest pull dropped my balance to 600 and the item landed in my bag, which means these gems work exactly like gems bought with real money.

Invincible needs a game restart to kick in, but once it does, it's thorough. I stood still in the middle of a ring of wolves and orcs for a full minute and my health bar stayed full. Then I went toe to toe with the raging farmer and didn't lose a single sliver of health until the boss fell.

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

• Invincible and Offline play both need a game restart to work; switching them on mid-battle leaves that battle unchanged.
• Three-day packs still pay out day by day as originally designed, so you collect the rest when you open the game the next day.
• Turning on Offline play also removes everything you'd normally get by watching ads, including the double-reward button and the button that opens two extra slots on the lucky wheel.

What it's like to actually play

The clearest strength is that the game runs fully without a connection. I turned on airplane mode and started the game from scratch, and I still reached the main screen with my full balance. The shop still opened, the idle chest still paid out, and I played through a chapter and beat the boss as normal, which makes it a real pocket game for a long bus ride.

The art has thick, bold outlines and chunky, rounded characters that are easy to read in a crowd. The light-beam skill sweeping across the screen is a real treat to watch.

The downsides deserve a straight answer too. The game crams in far too many purchase offers, and reopening it once can stack three promo panels on top of each other. Sometimes the close button won't even respond until you deal with the tutorial panel waiting behind it.

On Google Play the game holds 4.4 stars from more than 27,000 reviews and has passed a million downloads. That matches how it felt to me: the gameplay is good, and the selling is a bit greedy.

Who should download it

If you like one-finger games where each run takes a few minutes and always sends you home with loot, this is a good one to keep on your phone. It doesn't ask you to learn anything. And the artifact layer and hero roster are deep enough to give you a reason to come back after a few days.

And if you installed Survivor Kingdoms before and quit because of that zero in the gem counter, this mod changes the game completely. Free pack purchases lets you open chests and swap heroes as much as you like, and Invincible removes the most frustrating part, dying to the boss right when you finally figured out the fight. Both run fine on an ordinary phone, with no need to root it.