Last Green: Tower Defense

I opened Last Green with fairly low expectations, figuring a cutely drawn plant tower defense would be good for a few casual stages before I set it aside, and the first stage really was easy. Monsters wandered in one at a time, and the wall barely took a scratch through the first several waves.

Then came the ninth wave of that very same first stage, and the screen filled up with hat-wearing monsters. My three plants couldn't shoot fast enough, the wall broke, and the results panel showed a single line: waves reached this time, nine, which is to say just one wave short.

Exactly ten waves per battle, and the ninth is where I fell

The battlefield runs vertically, with monsters walking down from the top edge of the screen. You hold a wall stretched across the bottom with eight empty pots. Plants in the pots shoot on their own, so there's nothing to aim; your job is just to decide which plants to grow and when.

Your in-battle resource is a green dew that trickles in over time and drops a little extra whenever a monster dies. The bottom of the screen has just two buttons that spend it: Summon, which drops a random plant into an empty pot, and Enhance, which raises your whole lineup by one tier.

Both buttons get pricier the more you press them, so a battle is really a budgeting puzzle. Lean on Summon and the wall fills up with plants that are all weak; pour dew into Enhance and the plants get strong while empty spots on the wall sit idle.

Every battle has exactly ten waves, each bigger than the last, and by wave eight a few hulking monsters start leading the pack behind them. If the wall breaks before wave ten is done, you lose, and a loss still pays out a pile of items, just without any stars.

Two identical plants side by side become one stronger plant

What sets Last Green apart from the usual tower defense games is plant merging. You drag one plant onto another of the same kind and level, both disappear, and a higher-level plant sprouts in that spot, shooting harder while taking up only one pot.

That sounds neat, but in practice it's quite a chore, because the Summon button hands you a random plant from the five-plant lineup you brought, so to merge you have to wait for the right pair to show up. And while you wait, the wall keeps taking hits and your hand is busy dragging and dropping.

From wave six onward I barely had time to look down at the row of pots. All eight slots were full of level 1 plants, two identical ones sat just one pot apart without me getting the chance to drag them together, and that's the most infuriating way to lose in this game.

Every few waves the game makes you pick a card

At some point in the battle everything freezes and three skill cards appear. Each card's color shows its rarity, blue for Rare and purple for Epic. You pick one and it applies for the rest of that battle, then it's gone, and the next battle starts the draw over.

Some of the cards I drew raised damage by a flat sixty percent, and some changed how plants shoot altogether, like firing two extra spreading peas with each one twenty percent weaker. There are also cards tied to one specific plant, and if you draw one without that plant in your lineup, it's a wasted pick.

There's a Refresh button to swap all three cards, and that button carries a video ad icon. That's the first place I noticed the best rewards always sit behind a video rather than behind your skill as a player.

Outside battle there's a whole farm to look after

Step out of a battle and you're on a rather busy main screen, with six tabs along the bottom that unlock as your account levels up. There's a place to raise your Lord with six equipment slots, a Plants collection, a shop, dungeons and even a farm.

The Plants collection is the most important part, because it decides which five plants you can bring into battle. Plants come in B, A and S grades, each with its own level and star rank. Every extra plant you unlock adds a little damage to your whole lineup.

New plants come from opening plant chests in the shop with keys, the familiar gacha routine. I opened a ten-key pull and got an A-grade fire mushroom, which inherits thirty percent of your Lord's attack, so how strong it is depends on how far you've raised your main character.

On the Lord's side, every piece of equipment can be upgraded with coins plus materials. The first tier costs only four hundred coins and two materials, but the very next tier already wants four materials, and my stock was at exactly zero, so the real wall isn't coins.

Five stamina per battle, and that's the real bottleneck

Every time you tap to enter a battle, the game takes five stamina, and your stamina tops out at fifty. That means one sitting gets you exactly ten battles in a row. After that you wait, or open the stamina panel and watch a video for fifteen more points.

That panel has a limit too, and once you've used up the day's views the button grays out. Anywhere in the game that shows Remaining with a number next to it is a valve. And Last Green scatters valves everywhere, from opening chests to doubling your end-of-battle rewards.

The end-of-battle rewards are the most annoying part. You finish ten waves, and the reward panel appears with coins, XP books, seeds and a few scrolls. Right underneath is a Claim x2 button with a video icon, meaning half of what you just earned is held back behind an ad.

And if you'd rather pay to speed things up, the game sells packs that run from $0.49 to $149.99 per item on the US Google Play store. On top of that, the First Top-up and Privileges icons start flashing red along the edge of the main screen from level three.

The mod removes exactly the things that blocked me

Our mod drops a floating MOD button in the corner of the screen. Tap it and six switches appear, most of them with sliders so you can pick the strength yourself. Everything changes right in the battle you're playing, with no need to back out and come in again.

The most valuable option is the sun discount, sun being the mod's name for that green dew, and the pair of numbers below comes from the same battle with three plants on the wall. With the mod off, Enhance cost 100 and Summon cost 30. At 80%, those two numbers dropped to 20 and 6, so the budgeting puzzle above all but disappears.

The cooldown reduction changes how a battle feels completely. The three plants standing on my wall had base intervals of six, seven and six seconds. Push it to 90% and all three drop to six tenths of a second, and the screen goes from a few scattered shots to a downpour.

And here's the run where I saw the gap most clearly. Same stage 1: with every mod off I died at wave nine. With damage taken reduction at 99% plus auto-merge, I went all ten waves, the 3016-HP wall didn't lose a single point, and I took all three stars.

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

• The instant rewards option skips the video but not the daily limit. Anywhere that says three times remaining still means three times.
• Drag a slider back to Off and the original numbers return at once. But flip the switch off entirely and the last level stays stuck until you reopen the game.
• The top speed really is six times as fast, measured in the same battle. If it looks slower, that's because the battle stands still between waves and while the results panel or the skill picker is open.

One more thing worth mentioning is the ads, because with the mod off, tapping Claim x2 made the game say it couldn't load an ad and then grayed out the button. In other words, the doubled reward wasn't just slow to get, it was lost completely. With the mod on, the items arrive within two seconds.

How it plays for real

What I like most is the art and the sound. Every plant has a personality of its own, and the flying shots and freezing effects look great on a portrait screen. You can play it one-handed, and each battle wraps up in about three to four minutes, which is perfect for spare moments.

What I don't like is just as clear, starting with the fact that the whole game sits behind a mandatory login screen, so you need an account before you can go any further. I had to sign up with an email right there on the spot, because there's no guest button at all.

The game also needs a constant connection, not just at login. I cut the network and reopened it, and it sat on the Loading bar for a minute and a half without ever reaching the main screen. At one point it even reported a failed download and made me retry.

On Google Play, Last Green holds 4.6 stars and has passed 10,000 downloads. That's a small number next to the big-name tower defense games, but enough to show a real player base is there.

So who should play it

If you like tower defense but find games where you place towers along winding maps a hassle, the straight wall plus plant merging here is much easier to get into. Be prepared, though, for how tightly the game clings to the network, so it's not something to take on a plane or anywhere with a weak signal.

And if you downloaded this game before and dropped it because you kept dying at one particular wave and then had to sit waiting for stamina, the mod hits exactly that spot. The sun discount lets you build your lineup in time, and damage taken reduction keeps the wall standing until the last wave. Auto-merge, meanwhile, does the dragging and dropping that no hand can keep up with once the monsters pile in.