Legend of Survivors

The speed button that stays at x1 no matter how often you tap it

I opened this game with a pretty simple expectation: an auto-shooter to kill time, the kind where your character stands in the middle while monsters pour in from every side. Chapter one went smoothly, and while waiting for the horde to thicken I noticed a very familiar double-arrow button in the bottom-right corner, with x1 written under it.

One tap, nothing. Three more taps and the number still sat at x1, while the monsters crawled in at exactly the same pace. That's when I realized the button is real and built right into the interface; the game has just locked it, without a single word about what you'd need to do to open it.

That detail kept me around longer than planned. A run here lasts about four to six minutes, and most of that time is spent watching your character fight while you just drag to dodge. Having a speed button you can't use feels exactly like being locked behind a glass door.

How a run plays out

The loop is the standard survivor formula many people know from Vampire Survivors. You drag a finger on the lower half of the screen to move, while your character aims and fires on its own. Your only job is to dodge and collect the XP stones the monsters drop.

Collect enough stones and you level up, and each level-up pauses the game so you can pick one of three cards. On the left of the screen are six active skill slots, on the right six passive ones. So almost every run you end up shaping a different build, depending on which cards the game deals you.

The progress bar in the top-right corner tracks how many monsters you kill, not the clock. When it's nearly full, the whole screen flashes red with a boss-incoming warning. My chapter two run ended at 1,552 monsters in three minutes and forty-eight seconds, which gives you an idea of how dense the hordes are.

Five-star cards and the tiny evolution tag

The most interesting part of the card picks is the stars under each card. Get an active skill to five stars, paired with the right matching passive, and the game unlocks an ultimate move that's far stronger than everything else in your set.

The game signals this with a small "evolve" tag on the bottom edge of the card, with two icons showing what it needs to be paired with. That tag is so small and faint that I missed it completely for the first few runs, and kept wondering why my build had every slot filled yet still hit so weakly.

Among the cards there's even one called Rasengan, and I still can't tell whether that's a deliberate nod or something left over from somewhere else.

Outside battle there's a whole lobby to manage

Back in the lobby, you'll find the game is heavier on character progression than it looks. There's a four-tier talent tree where each node costs a thousand gold to unlock and adds straight to your stats; the first node, for example, gives two extra attack.

Next to it is an equipment vault with five separate groups: heroes, mounts, gems, artifacts and auras. A rare weapon goes from level one to level thirty, and every upgrade eats a thousand gold plus scrolls, and scrolls are much rarer than gold.

The main source of gear is the chests in the shop, which is also where the game's two currencies show their faces. A single rare chest costs four hundred gems, ten cost three thousand seven hundred and fifty. The epic chest gives you one free open, then locks for exactly three days before the next one.

And this is where the game starts squeezing you

The first thing to stop me wasn't difficulty but the energy bar at the top of the screen. Each run eats eight of your fifty points, and by my timing each point takes a full ten minutes to come back, so every run you play leaves you owing eighty minutes of waiting.

Do the math and refilling all fifty points takes more than eight hours, enough for six runs a day if you don't touch your wallet. For a game where a run lasts four to six minutes, that means half an hour of play before you have to put the phone away for the night.

The second bottleneck is ads, planted in exactly the two most painful spots. The skill selection screen has a refresh button to draw three different cards. And when you fall, the revive dialog invites you to watch an ad to come back with half your HP; the other option asks for an item a new account doesn't have.

I tried the ad revive once and sat through almost a minute and a half for two ads back to back, one of them a playable ad that refused to show a close button. Right under that dialog the game hangs a sign selling the permanent no-ads pack for $9.99, with fifty gems a day included, so it's hard to believe its placement is a coincidence.

Purchases come in two families: Lumenite runs from a $0.99 pack up to a $99.99 one, while gems give you thirty free a day before the $4.99 bag and the $9.99 chest. And that's not counting the three-day starter pack that pops up every time you return to the lobby.

The mod unlocks that very button

Our mod has three switches, and the one most worth having is the one that unlocks the speed button. Turn it on in the MOD menu and restart the game once so it takes hold, then go into a battle and tap the double-arrow button in the bottom-right corner: the battle runs three times faster.

To check whether it's real, I ran a slightly silly test: stand still in one spot for exactly fifty-three seconds, then read the numbers on screen. With the mod off, my character killed a hundred and seven monsters and the progress bar crept from 0.1% to 3.6%. With the mod on, over the same stretch, the bar jumped from 4.7% to 56% and the chapter two boss showed up.

The second switch is Block network, and it neatly takes care of the ads. I turned it on and played a whole chapter two run without a single ad interrupting. At the end I still got all the gold and XP, and my balances in the lobby afterwards were intact.

The third switch is Free paid packs. When I first tested it, it was broken on the game version of the time: I tried three different groups of packs in the shop and none of them reacted, with balances unchanged. We kept it in the list with a warning rather than hiding it to look good, and after a fix it now works on version 2.0.0: six different packs, from the $0.99 starter pack to the $9.99 no-ads pack, all landed in the wallet.

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

• The x1 next to the speed button never changes, even while the battle is running three times faster, so watch the monsters' pace rather than that number.
• The speed applies to both sides, so monsters are three times faster too, and I fell to the chapter two boss twice in a row because I left it on for the whole fight.
• Every time the card selection screen appears, the game resets the speed to normal; tap the button again to speed back up.
• With the network blocked, the two ad-for-reward buttons stop working too; tapping them just takes you back to the previous screen.

How it plays

The visuals deserve honest praise: neatly modeled 3D characters, clear skill effects, and backgrounds that change properly from chapter to chapter instead of just swapping colors. The settings even offer three frame-rate levels and three graphics quality levels, so weaker phones can turn things down and still play.

The settings also hold two switches I wish I'd found sooner: auto skill selection and auto skill use. Turn both on and a run practically plays itself, perfect for having the game open while you do something else.

My complaint is that the rewards are generous but the doorway is narrow. The game sprinkles gold and XP freely after every run, but upgrade scrolls and character shards only trickle in, so your stats stall while chapter difficulty keeps climbing.

On Google Play the game holds 4.7 stars from more than seventy-four thousand ratings and has passed a million downloads. Most of the low ratings I read revolve around exactly the ads.

So who should play it

If you're looking for a survival shooter to open for a few minutes at a time, with plenty to upgrade but no complicated rules to learn, this is a pleasant pick, and it asks nothing of your hands except dragging to dodge. The graphics are good enough not to feel cheap, and a four-minute run fits nicely into waiting for the bus.

And if you downloaded it before and gave up because every run ended with an ad, or because the speed button never budged, those two switches fix exactly those two things. Just remember they make battles faster and cleaner, not you stronger; your stats still have to be ground out like everyone else's.