Mythic Survivors

The first time you open Mythic Survivors, you pick one of four classes and drop straight into chapter one, a glowing marsh, with a clock at the top of the screen counting down from 08:00. We figured eight minutes couldn't be that hard, until the third time we went down at the 05:00 mark and noticed that chapter two was still firmly locked.

This is the kind of game where you never press a fire button. Your character fires at the nearest enemy on their own, and your only job is to drag the circle in the lower half of the screen to run, dodge and scoop up the green gems the monsters drop. It sounds relaxing, but the monster count climbs every minute, and by minute six the whole screen is a solid wall of green.

The marsh's eight minutes last longer than you think

A battle starts out very open, with just a few stray monsters wandering in from the edges of the screen, so you can run and collect at leisure. We took down twenty of them in the first half minute without dodging once, which made us think chapter one was just a token tutorial.

The countdown clock is what deserves your attention. It isn't how long you've survived but the length of the whole chapter, so to win you have to hold out until it hits 00:00, and the game piles on monsters right along with it. By minute four the monsters move in herds, and by minute six they stack up into one big mass that pushes you back into a corner.

Our longest run stopped at the 05:00 mark with 1,369 monsters killed, and the end screen still showed a bright red Defeat. The end-of-battle stats do list a battle time of 08:00, but that's the chapter length, not how long you survived, so don't look at that number and assume you made it to the end.

Every few dozen seconds you pick one of three cards

The green gems dropped by monsters are your experience, and when you've collected enough, the game pauses, dims the screen and flips three skill cards for you to choose from. One fires bouncing shuriken, one fires a wide piercing beam, and one is the signature skill of the class you're playing. Every card shows how many seconds it takes to fire and its damage percentage.

Pick a card you already have and it ranks up; the piercing beam, for example, went from one shot every 3.5 seconds to one every 2.5 seconds, with damage jumping from 100% to 200%. Under each card there's also an Evolution line with two linked icons, which means that once you meet the conditions, the skill turns into a much stronger form.

This is exactly what makes every battle different. On one run we poured everything into the piercing beam and blasted straight lines through whole rows of monsters. On the next we spread picks across three branches by mistake and were already flagging by minute four, because no branch was strong enough to clear the crowd.

Four classes, but the talent tree is what decides things

The game has four classes, an archer, a warlord, a vanguard and an arcane mage, each with its own signature skill and fighting style. Switching classes isn't a single button, because you change your class by swapping the weapon you have equipped. Each class also has its own rank, so jumping to a new class means going back to the starting line.

Outside of battle there's also a talent tree that grows along with your class rank. Every node on the tree is a small, very specific bonus, like 2% more attack speed for 300 gold, or a side attack that fires a big arrow bouncing twice for 10 diamonds. Every node has to be unlocked with currency, and the deeper a node sits, the higher the class rank it demands.

Running alongside that tree is the forge for your gear. We equipped the epic helmet that dropped from a chest, then hit Quick Upgrade on the bow. It ran in one go from level 1 to level 10, and the power rating at the top jumped from 99.88k to more than 134 thousand. That power rating is the number you'll look at most, because it's the quickest way to tell whether you just got stronger or are only treading water.

Three currencies, and all of them lead back to gems

Gold is the easiest to earn, since even a lost battle pays over a thousand, and gold unlocks the cheaper talent nodes and pays for gear upgrades. Upgrade scrolls are the second currency, sold almost exclusively in the Daily Shop, which only refreshes once a day and only lets you buy each slot one to three times.

Gems are what the game really sells. The Daily Shop lists clothing for 2,000 gold, ten weapon upgrade scrolls for 2,500 gold and twenty boot upgrade scrolls for 5,000 gold. Going the other way, 40 gems trade for 10,000 gold, and 2,700 gems trade for a whole million.

Chests come in three clear tiers. The rare chest gives one free pull a day, while the epic chest offers a free pull every six hours and then costs 100 gems per extra pull. The legendary chest alone demands 500 gems for one pull or 4,500 gems for ten. Cosmetics live in a world of their own, with the Mafia outfit priced at 5,000 gems.

A lost battle pays two gems, and the legendary chest wants five hundred

This is where we stalled for the second time. The first end-of-battle screen paid out 1,120 gold, exactly two gems and a few odd upgrade scrolls, and a battle like that eats the full eight minutes if you last to the end.

Divide the 500 gems of one legendary chest pull by two gems per battle and you get two hundred fifty battles. That works out to more than thirty hours of nonstop play for a single pull. And that same chest openly states that it takes ten pulls to guarantee one legendary item, and thirty pulls to guarantee an S-grade one.

The ad shop leaves you a small way out, with three daily video views for 20 thousand gold, three for 25 gems and two for a rare chest. Add up a whole day and you get 75 gems, which still means nearly a week of diligently tapping ads for one pull. The other way is to open your wallet, and on the US Google Play store the game's purchases run from $0.99 to $49.99 per item.

The mod removes exactly that money knot

Install the game through VipMod and a red sign-shaped MOD button appears on its left edge; tap it and you get two rows of switches. We turned them on one at a time, then repeated the exact actions we had tried with them off, to see how the numbers moved. The figures below were measured on version 1.0.16.

The first row is Skip ads, and it's the most valuable row because it opens exactly the game's narrowest gate. With it off, tapping the «Gold 20k» slot in the ad shop played a Meta clip for the full thirty-seven seconds before paying out, gold 1,500 to 21,500. With it on, the same slot showed no clip at all, the Claimed label appeared in under four seconds, and gold went from 21,500 to 41,500. The «Gems 25» slot did the same, gems 10 to 35, and the «Rare Chest» slot opened straight into a Rare greatsword, with everything still there after closing and reopening the game.

The Battle speed-up row can be checked against the battle's own countdown clock. Left off, that clock runs exactly in step with a real clock. Drag the slider to the 0.050 notch and the battle clock went from 07:14 to 06:13, sixty-one seconds of battle, while barely twenty-one real seconds passed, nearly three times as fast. Over the same stretch the number of monsters killed jumped from 13 to 55.

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

• Skip ads doesn't break the game's limits. Each day still allows only three gold views, three gem views and two chest views, and a skipped ad still uses up one view as usual.
• The Freeze resources row was removed as of game version 1.0.16. In this version, the spot where spending could be blocked sits on a function that makes the game close itself on launch as soon as the mod touches it, so we pulled the option entirely rather than leave a switch that does nothing.
• Push the speed too high and monsters arrive faster than your reflexes. At the very top notch, 0.067, our run died after only 125 kills, while the normal run before that had taken down 1,369.

How it plays for real

The biggest plus is how polished the presentation is. The top-down 3D art is clean, the projectile effects and floating damage numbers are a treat to watch, and the phone never heated up during half an hour of nonstop play.

The first downside is that the game requires a connection. We cut the network and reopened it, and it stopped at 95% with a dialog saying an internet connection is needed to play, with no solo mode to fall back on. On a plane or in an elevator, consider it a break.

The second downside is exactly what players complain about in Google Play reviews: gems are steeply priced, and the endless tower pushes harder for purchases the higher you climb. Another common complaint is that the game doesn't yet let you sign in with a Google account, so uninstalling by mistake and reinstalling wipes all your progress.

Even so, the overall picture is good. On Google Play, Mythic Survivors holds 4.7 stars from about 13,000 reviews and passed 100,000 downloads within its first few months. A recent update added chapters 31 to 35, Divine gear and several new bosses, so the publisher is clearly still looking after the game properly.

So who should play it

If you like bullet-heaven games where you run around while projectiles bloom across the whole screen, and you enjoy shaping a different build every battle, this is a well-made take on the genre that runs light. Just remember it always needs a connection, so don't pick it as your time-killer for the commute.

And if you gave up right at the point of looking at the 500 gems of a single chest pull and working out dozens of hours of grinding, the mod handles a good part of that for you. Skip ads turns every reward video into an instant payout, and the speed slider cuts an eight-minute battle down to two or three. That's enough to keep you moving forward instead of standing still counting coins.