Monster Slayer

I opened Monster Slayer expecting to steer a character around slashing monsters, but by the very first stage I realized I wasn't steering anything. The blonde heroine stands there swinging her sword on her own, the monsters walk up on their own, and the player's job comes down to three yellow buttons in the lower half of the screen.

That sounds dull, yet it's oddly addictive once you sit down with it. Every upgrade tap visibly pushes the damage number up, and the monsters fall a little faster. I kept tapping like that for about forty minutes until I reached stage 1-8, and right then the Shop button in the right corner started to have a reason to exist.

How a stage goes when you aren't steering anything

Every stage is a horizontal stretch of road, with your hero on the left and monsters coming in from the right. The progress bar at the top of the screen counts your kills until a skull appears at the end of the road. That skull is the boss, and you have to tap it to start the fight, because it won't come to you.

The boss fight is the only part of a stage with any pressure, because next to its red health bar runs a green bar ticking down as a timer. If time runs out before the boss falls, you go back to fighting regular monsters, collect more gold and buy a few more upgrade levels. Trying again costs you nothing but a few minutes.

Those three yellow buttons are Attack, HP and HP Regen, one row each. Every tap buys one level, and the price of the next level creeps up a little. Gold flows in from the very monsters dying out there, so the real loop of the game is to watch for a bit, tap a burst of upgrades, then watch again.

There's a small x2 button along the top edge that makes the whole fight run twice as fast. It's free, too, with nothing to watch or pay. The game also has a battery saver mode that dims the screen while everything keeps running, which suits a game you leave alone and check on every so often.

Aislight fights alone until you dig up a second hero

The starting character is Aislight, five stars, Epic tier. In the hero list, almost every other slot says Not owned. She has three equipment slots, for a weapon, armor and a locked potion slot, plus a row of milestone rewards at levels 10, 25, 35, 50, 75 and 100.

Upgrading a hero doesn't cost gold but emeralds, a green currency that only drops from a few rare sources. Each level eats two hundred of them, and getting to level two used up everything I had. At that point it's clear that how fast your squad grows depends on finding a second and third hero, not on raising one forever.

My second hero arrived by a rather surprising route. After my first pack purchase, the First Top-up screen popped up on its own and handed me a Mythic-tier hero named RAY outright. Once RAY stood next to Aislight, the monster-clearing speed was a different story; stages that used to take a dozen upgrade taps now went by in silence.

Summoning, and the 35-pull bar standing in the way

Gems are the blue currency in the top corner. They really only have one meaningful place to go, the Summon board on the very first tab of the Shop. An x11 equipment summon takes 500 gems and an x35 summon takes 1500, and in exchange a fistful of weapons, boots and clothing of all kinds drops out at once.

The annoying part is the level bar right above it. Equipment only levels up to 2 after exactly 35 summons, and each level after that wants another batch just as big. In other words, you don't buy power with one tap, you buy it with a count of pulls, and that count turns into gems very quickly.

The other two boards, Skills and Pets, are locked, one opening at quest 25 and the other at quest 36. Quests show up as scrolls on the right of the play screen, and each one you finish pays roughly 100 to 150 gems. That sounds fine, until you put it next to the price of one summon.

Where the game starts staring right at you

The Shop has four tabs, and every one of them has a green dollar price waiting. The Hero Pack and the Mystery Pack both cost $11.99: the first gives 30000 gems plus 200 emeralds and 100 hero shards, the second 48000 gems plus enhancement dust and 33 dungeon keys.

The Limited tab is cheaper but sold in rations: the Dungeon Pack at $0.99 for 3000 gems and its Elite version at $1.99 for 4500 gems, each limited to two purchases a day. The Special tab sells a 28-day membership pack for $4.99, in return for daily gifts and a few dungeon-clearing conveniences.

Right next to those packs, the game puts a Free slot each day for exactly 1000 gems. That slot is what reveals the real math. Saving up 30000 gems from the free slot takes a month, while the $11.99 pack takes one tap, and the whole design of the game revolves around that gap.

To be fair, Monster Slayer doesn't corner you, since there are no lives to wait for and no hearts refilling by the hour, and losing to a boss costs nothing. It simply stretches the time out, then sells that time back to you pack by pack.

What the mod can do in the Shop

The MOD menu sits behind the floating red octagon button on the left edge of the screen, and it opens to exactly one switch, called Free pack purchases. You have to turn it on first and then open the game for it to work. After that, go into the Shop and tap the price of the pack you want, that very green button.

What appears isn't Google's payment screen but the game's own Rewards panel. The full contents of the pack land in your wallet right in front of you. When I tapped the Hero Pack, my gems ran from 109300 to 139300, along with 200 emeralds and 100 hero shards, exactly what the pack advertises.

I tried six different packs spread across all four tabs, from the cheapest $0.99 pack to the 28-day membership, and not one of them failed or froze the game. More importantly, those gems can really be spent: I took 500 gems to the summon board and got all 11 pieces of equipment, with the balance dropping by exactly 500.

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

• The switch only touches the packs in the Shop. It doesn't write numbers straight onto the Gold or gem counters on the status bar, so everything still has to come through the Shop.
• Rationed packs still count their rations as usual, and once you've taken both purchases for the day, that slot grays out until tomorrow.
• Rewards you've received stay for good. I turned the switch off completely and reopened the game, and my gems were untouched and both heroes were still there.

Three ad views without a single ad playing

The game hangs a Legendary hero named Elena behind an offer to watch three ads, meaning three times you're supposed to sit still until the clip ends. Inside VipMod, I tapped three times in a row, the counter ran from 0/3 to 3/3 without any clip appearing, then the Claim button lit up and Elena joined the squad.

The same thing happened with the free equipment summon slot, the one plainly labeled watch an ad to summon. I tapped it and got all 20 pieces of equipment without my gem count moving by a single one. After that, the slot switched to an eight-minute countdown, exactly by the game's rules.

This isn't the mod's doing but the way these ad reward slots behave when the game runs inside VipMod, so it makes more sense to treat it as a bonus on the side. What matters is that these slots really pay out instead of being dead buttons, because with some games you can tap away inside VipMod and get nothing at all.

How it plays for real

What I like most is that the game runs smoothly without a connection, and that's something I actually tested rather than guessed. I cut off every network connection and reopened it from scratch, and the game went straight to the main screen with my balance intact; I kept fighting, beat the boss and cleared a new stage. The Shop still opened and still delivered packs normally.

The art is round and hand-drawn in style with bright colors, the characters look cute, and the bosses are drawn with real care.

The downside, put plainly, is that the gameplay is thin, with almost no interesting decisions in the first half hour, since you just tap three buttons in whatever order you like. The depth sits in skills and pets, and those stay locked until quests 25 and 36, which is quite a while after the first impression has cooled off.

On Google Play the game holds 4.7 stars from more than 41,000 reviews and has passed a million downloads, numbers that say the crowd it suits is far from small.

So who should play it

If you're looking for a game to open while waiting for the bus or for dinner, tap a few times, close it again, and still see your character get stronger every time you come back, this is exactly what you need. It doesn't ask you to be skilled, it doesn't ask for your focus, and it doesn't punish you for walking away for two days.

And if you installed it before and gave up because gems came in far too slowly while that $11.99 pack kept popping up in your face, the mod removes exactly the thing that pushed you away. With the Shop unlocked, what's left of the game is the part worth playing: watching your squad grow stronger and pushing your stages as far as they'll go.