Mercs of Vanta

I opened Mercs of Vanta because the name sounded like a shooter, but what showed up was a tidy little pixel-art tower defense made by a studio from Vietnam. A world chat box ran along the bottom of the screen for my entire session.

The first three waves went by so smoothly that I figured this was a game you open for ten minutes of fun and then close. By the fourth wave my food had run dry, and the cards in the shop were all common troops. The button that promised fifteen extra food did nothing, no matter how many times I tapped it.

That's when I understood this game isn't as gentle as it looks. The button wasn't broken; it was just waiting for you to watch an ad, and inside VipMod that ad never arrives. That's also when the mod started to mean something to me.

A stage has only five waves, but those five waves are packed

A stage here comes down to five waves, and between two waves you always get a pause to prepare. That pause opens a table of three mercenary cards at five food each, while the button that refreshes the table costs another two food.

Food is a currency that only lives for one battle and is gone when the battle ends, so you have to spend it right away rather than save it for the next stage. Once you buy them, the troops line up on the field, pick their own targets and fight on their own; your job is to watch the whole field and decide whether to buy more or merge.

That sounds relaxing, but the next wave still arrives on schedule whether you're ready or not. You control the main character by tapping and dragging anywhere on the screen, and it feels like a virtual joystick appearing right under your finger.

Tagging along with you is a pet named Puppis. It doesn't carry a weapon, but it halves the attack speed of the monsters standing around it. That sounds minor, yet in the crowded waves it really does carry the whole field.

Six mercenaries, and the card table always lacks the one you need

Your full squad is one hero plus six mercenaries, which sounds roomy until you've played a few battles. The card table between waves shows the drop rates right in the left corner of the screen, and those numbers aren't kind at all.

Roughly eighty-six percent are Common troops, twelve percent are Elite, and only two percent are Ultra Rare. To get stronger you have to collect duplicates and tap Merge to combine them into a higher tier, and that's where food really gets spent.

Every refresh of the card table while hunting for the one you're missing burns two food. If that troop does show up, you pay another five food to bring it home. Do the multiplication for a moment and you'll see why that button promising fifteen extra food is so tempting.

The good part is that every troop belongs to its own faction, and grouping the right ones gives the whole squad a stat bonus. You can't just buy whatever looks expensive. The bad part is that on an unlucky run you sit and stare at three useless cards for three refreshes in a row.

Stage effects are where a run swerves in a new direction

After a few waves the game pauses and offers three Stage Effect cards to pick from, the kind of card draft anyone who has played a roguelite will recognize. On one run I drew a card giving ranged troops one hundred fifty percent more max health. On another, all three cards were minor range tweaks.

Below the three cards is a Refresh button, and it's the first button with a film-reel icon you'll meet in a battle. You can only refresh once per stage, so picking the wrong card in wave two drags the rest of the battle along with it.

Step out of battle and a whole village is waiting

After a stage, the game takes you back to a village seen from above, with a campfire, a well and a few soldiers loitering around. Here you hold three resources that are completely separate from in-battle food: gold coins, diamonds and energy.

The Inventory tab gives you six equipment slots around your character. The first item I got was a common Short Sword with twenty-five percent more damage. Every item also has seven locked sub-stat slots, which means there's another layer of grinding behind the regular upgrades.

Upgrading that sword one tier cost me a hundred coins and an enhancement stone, exactly the coins I'd collected over the first two stages. The village also has leaderboards, a shop, and a world chat where players spend the whole day recruiting each other into guilds.

Twenty-five energy, and every stage eats five

This is where the game starts squeezing you, and it squeezes with the energy bar rather than with ad screens. The bar holds twenty-five points when full and each Journey stage takes exactly five, so you get five runs in a row before you have to sit and wait.

My energy refilled at about two minutes per point, which works out to ten minutes for the next stage. That number won't kill anyone, but it cuts in right when you want to play just one more round.

The shop runs two separate summons, one paid in coins for equipment and one paid in diamonds for mercenaries and heroes. A single pull costs three hundred and a five-pull costs one thousand five hundred, and the game states plainly that it takes fifty pulls to guarantee one Legendary troop.

By the time I'd unlocked the shop, my diamond wallet was still at zero while a single pull already cost three hundred. On the US Google Play store, the game's purchases run from $0.99 to $129.99 per item, so you can picture the gap for yourself.

Between those two shores, the game leaves a cheap way out: watching ads. In one session I counted exactly four such doors: the +15 food button in battle, the stage effect refresh, the daily shop reset and one extra troop pull. Every one of them is paid for with a video.

The mod fixes the two things that annoyed me most

The problem is that those four buttons simply don't work when you play inside VipMod, because the ads there never manage to load. The buttons still light up nicely, but tapping them does nothing, and I tried each one with the mod off to make sure I wasn't just missing the tap.

Open the MOD menu, turn on No ads, restart the game, and everything changes at once. Tap the +15 food button and the food counter jumps from twenty to thirty-five in a blink, with no video playing. I spent that food right away on three troop cards and dropped them onto the field.

The other three buttons work exactly the same way. The refresh button swaps out all three stage effect cards, the daily shop reset replaces the whole list of goods, and the extra pull hands me a brand-new mercenary.

The second option in the menu is called One-hit kills, and it squeezes every monster's health down to almost nothing. That sounds simple, but the result is dramatic: anything you hit dies on the spot, including the hulking boss at the end of the fifth wave.

I replayed stage one with the same rhythm of button presses, once with the mod and once without. The run without the mod took about two minutes just to crawl to the third wave. With the mod on, in the same amount of time I'd finished all five waves and was back in the village collecting rewards.

There are three things you should know up front so you aren't disappointed. First, No ads needs a game restart before it takes effect, while One-hit kills switched on mid-battle kicks in from the next wave. Second, once One-hit kills is on, the challenge pretty much evaporates, so if you enjoy the tension, leave that one off.

Third, the No ads option also promises to hide the banner at the bottom of the screen, which I had no way of checking. Banners never showed up here in the first place, so treat that part as a spare rather than something broken.

How it plays for real

What I like most is how compact it all is. The pixel art is clean, a battle only lasts a few minutes, and the loop of buying, merging and picking cards is addictive enough for those spells of waiting around for a bus.

My complaint is that the game needs a connection before it will even start. I cut the network and reopened it, and the screen froze at the login step; no matter how many times I tapped the guest login button, it never got past that point.

The opening tutorial is a bit cryptic too. At one point the game makes you walk your character over to one specific person in the village before it lets you keep fighting, without ever saying so clearly. I fumbled around there for a few minutes before realizing I had to walk.

On Google Play, Mercs of Vanta sits at 4.5 stars and has passed 5,000 downloads. Those are the numbers of a game that only came out in mid-2026, which means the community is still small, but the people who play it rate it highly.

Who should play it and who should skip it

If you're after a merge-style tower defense to play in short bursts, this is a light and decent choice. The loop is clear, a battle doesn't drag on too long, and you don't need to know anything about the genre beforehand.

And if you installed it before and gave up because you ran out of energy after five stages, or because those reward buttons never gave you anything, the mod fixes exactly those two spots. It won't give you extra diamonds and it won't unlock Legendary troops for you; what it gives back are the rewards the game promised in the first place.