Legend of Mushroom: Rush - SEA

I downloaded Legend of Mushroom with a very simple idea: an idle game to switch on and leave alone, checking in every so often to see how far my little mushroom had made it. The version covered here is the Southeast Asia edition, listed on Google Play as Legend of Mushroom: Rush - SEA.

Forty minutes later, the mushroom had cleared more than three hundred stages and my gold had jumped from eight coins to over twenty thousand. But the Level box next to the portrait was still sitting at 1, with the experience bar stuck at 0/350.

Seeing those two numbers side by side is when I understood how the game is put together. You move very fast in the part you can see, while the part that decides whether you're strong or weak lives somewhere else, and the game keeps a very tight grip on it.

How a stage goes by while you just watch

The mushroom stands on the left of the screen, monsters walk in from the right, and everything happens automatically because AUTO ON is switched on from the very first second. You don't tap to attack, you don't dodge, and you don't pick targets.

The only thing you decide is when to tap the red skull in the middle of the screen to start the Challenge fight. That fight is where the real tension is, because the game counts down thirty-eight seconds and lays out a row of progress dots. You have to kill enough monsters to reach the boss at the end of the row before the clock hits zero.

Win and the stage number moves up; lose and a green Defeat banner appears, and you go back to the old stage to keep collecting gold. Gold drops with every kill and lies scattered on the ground, and the mushroom picks it up by itself while it fights, so you don't have to touch anything.

Leave the phone alone for a few minutes and the game covers everything with a black screen and a big clock, with a line inviting you to swipe to leave power-saving mode. The battle keeps running underneath and the gold keeps coming in; you just can't see any of it.

The magic lamp is what decides how strong you get

At the bottom center of the screen sits a golden magic lamp, and that's the only way your mushroom gets gear. It doesn't come from the shop, and it doesn't come from stage rewards.

Light the lamp once and it hands you one item; my first was a black mushroom T-shirt with +99 HP, +6 attack and +1 armor. Putting it on moved my power from 10692 to 10877, one very small step.

On its own that number is underwhelming, but the gear screen has twenty slots and you have to fill every one of them with that same lamp. Lamp uses build up with the number of monsters you kill, so the real loop is fighting to earn lamp uses, lighting the lamp for gear, and using the gear to reach deeper stages.

The mushroom also has a class. By default it's a warrior mushroom that fights by throwing things, with a single active skill that deals 117% damage. The six passive skill slots below all still show question marks, and the small print at the bottom says you need level 15 before you can evolve into another class.

The homestead, a little village that opens after a few hundred stages

After a while the homestead tab at the bottom unlocks, and inside is a whole map rather than the stats panel I'd expected.

There's a mine to dig, a tech area, a processing workshop and a hall. There's also a mysterious merchant standing by the bridge, plus a work management desk in the top-right corner.

The interesting part is that more than half of the land in there is still gray and padlocked. The mushroom statue is locked, the mushroom parking lot is locked, and the Mushroom Manor with its green vegetable plots is locked too. My mushroom had already cleared over three hundred stages by then, so the unlock condition clearly isn't stage progress.

Dungeons locked by keys, with exactly two handed out per day

The dungeon tab opens earlier than the homestead and holds three dungeons of its own: a raid on the lamp thief, a challenge in the ice dragon's cave, and a team defense of a crumbling old city.

Each dungeon uses its own kind of key, and you only get two keys a day for each one. The rewards are good enough that you'll regret skipping them; the ice dragon's cave on its lowest difficulty alone paid out 40 gems plus three skill tickets and three companion tickets.

This is exactly where the game ties the familiar idle-genre knot. You're not short of time, you're short of attempts, and attempts only refill by the day, with no way to speed them up by playing harder.

And this is where the game starts asking for money

Right after my first lost Challenge fight, the Defeat banner pulled a sales panel up underneath it. The $0.99 starter pack includes a weapon, 220 gems, five five-minute speed-up tickets and 6000 gold. The panel adds a 3000% value label and a countdown of four days and sixteen hours.

Go into the shop and you'll see the whole price ladder, with gems sold from 99 for $0.99, then 499, 999 and 1999. Every tier carries a double first-purchase bonus, which makes it very hard to pass any of them up.

On the US Google Play store, a single purchase ranges from $0.49 up to $304.99. That last number isn't a typo; it's the most expensive pack the publisher offers.

To be fair, the game also gives away quite a lot. The limited-time shop has a free 150-gem pack that refreshes every day, and login events shower you with gifts throughout the first week. But those freebies are just enough to make you feel you're getting somewhere, not enough to fill twenty gear slots.

What the mod fixes, and where it stops

Tap the red sign-shaped MOD button on the left edge and a menu opens with thirteen rows of switches. The first row is Damage boost, and it's the one most worth turning on. Switch it on and pick a level, ×2, ×5, ×20 or Infinite, and every hit your mushroom lands is multiplied accordingly; on Infinite the number jumps straight to 1000.0T right above the monster's head.

One thing to say up front: the boss fight at the end of each stage is graded by the game server itself, so the mod switches itself off for that fight and you still have to beat the boss with your real strength. The mod works on the monster grind between stages, and that part flies by.

I turned it on for a brand-new account and reopened the game, and the mushroom went from stage 1 to past stage 300 in about forty minutes without me tapping anything else. What's worth noting is that the power rating stayed at 2455 the whole way, meaning you clear stages through damage output, not by actually getting stronger.

The Skip tutorial row does exactly what it says. I tried it twice on the same account to compare properly. Without it, I had to tap through every line of the Lamp Goddess's dialogue with a pointing hand covering half the screen; with it, the mushroom was already standing there fighting as soon as the game opened.

Three things you should know up front, so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• Damage is only boosted in the outgoing direction, while your HP and armor stay the same. Around stage 300 the Challenge fights still kept failing, because the mushroom got killed before it could land its hits.
• The Battle speed row goes up to x6 and looks great on early stages, but higher up it does almost nothing. Around stage 300, x6 gave me 676 gold a minute, while switching it off completely still gave 632 gold a minute.
• I couldn't verify the six farm-related rows or the War God tower row. Neither the Mushroom Manor nor the tower was unlocked on the account I built, so there was nothing to test.

What the mod gives you most of, in the end, is lamp uses. After forty minutes of running, the counter on the magic lamp reached 665, whereas playing by hand it only goes up by one or two a minute, so the gap is huge.

How it plays, and who should download it

Worth knowing for English-speaking players: this is the Southeast Asia server edition, and when I played, the world chat was almost entirely Vietnamese players discussing how far to upgrade their lamps. The game also shows a warning once you've played more than 180 minutes in a day.

What I don't like is that the game requires a connection. I cut the network and reopened it, and it stopped right at the loading screen with a panel saying it couldn't load resources. All you're left with is two buttons, quit or restart, so don't take it on a plane or down to an underground parking lot.

On Google Play this edition has passed a million downloads. The cute, round mushroom art and the gentle idle pace make it a better fit for busy people than for anyone who wants to sit down for long sessions.

If you're looking for a game to leave running next to your desk and glance at now and then, this is a sensible pick. There's nothing to learn and the mushroom fights on its own, so everything you have to decide each day comes down to spending your dungeon keys and using up your lamp.

And if you gave up on the game because you were stuck on one stage for days, the mod really does undo that knot, at least up to around stage three hundred. Just remember that it helps with the fighting, while the gear and the daily refills are still waiting for you.