Pixel Defenders: Merge TD Game

I downloaded Pixel Defenders because the pixel cover art looked harmless, and I figured it would be a light tower defense game to tap at in spare moments. Light it was, until the end of the opening stage's first wave. In the second wave, a whole pack of orcs rolled over my three heroes in under thirty seconds.

The Fortress HP bar fell from 5,000 straight to 0, and the screen that came up afterwards is what really stopped me. It didn't try to sell me anything. It just listed three very polite bullet points: upgrade your heroes, summon more heroes, upgrade your gear. All three need resources, and you only get resources by winning.

Every battle is exactly five waves

Each stage is five waves, counted down at the top of the screen by a row of little skulls, and the last wave almost always brings a boss three times the size of everything else. You stand on the left behind a fence, monsters come in from the right, and in between is a square grid where you place your units.

The in-battle currency is called Meat, and you start each stage with 100. The first summon costs just 1 Meat, the next 2, then 3, then 4, climbing with no brakes the more you call. In return, every monster that falls drops more Meat, so the rhythm of a battle is simple: summon, wait for your units to kill monsters, then spend that Meat to summon again.

Summoned heroes don't jump straight into the fight. They wait on a fifteen-slot bench at the bottom, and you drag each one onto the field grid by hand. A dashed line splits the field into two zones, and each zone holds only three units. So the challenge isn't how many units you have, it's who stands in front of whom.

Stack two identical heroes and you get a star

The word Merge in the title isn't decoration. Drag a one-star hero onto another one-star hero of the same kind and you instantly get a two-star. It's far stronger yet still takes up just one slot on the field, which makes merging the only way around the three-units-per-zone cap.

The catch is that the bench has only fifteen slots, and summons are random. More than once I sat staring at two matching heroes one slot apart, not daring to summon again, because one more would fill the bench and leave me no room to arrange anything. It feels more like a puzzle board racing the clock than a pure tower defense game.

Between waves, the game makes you draw a fate card

After each wave the screen dims and three cards flip over for you to pick one. One card makes the Fortress immune to ten percent of incoming attacks, another adds two levels to every hero you summon from then on. Others boost critical damage by fifty percent for your whole army, or add a thirty percent chance of Meat dropping each time you kill a monster.

Four or five cards stacking up over a battle are enough to make two back-to-back runs of the same stage play out completely differently. This is what pulls the game out of the old tower defense mold and closer to a roguelite. The only problem is that the reroll button is exactly where the game plants its ads, which I'll get to below.

Outside battle, a whole town waits behind padlocks

Win the first stage and the game opens a top-down town with a town hall, a tavern and a bakery. Around them sit five or six more buildings under padlock: a guild, a shrine, a goddess statue, a market stall and an airship dock. Count the padlocks and you can tell the game plans to keep you around for quite a while.

The Tavern is where the gacha lives. You get one free single summon a day, while the ten-pull costs tickets, and once you're out of tickets it switches to Rubies. I opened a ten-pull with the tickets I'd picked up in the opening stages and got one SR hero and two R heroes. The rest were just shards, and the pity bar needs a hundred pulls before it guarantees anything.

The hero collection spells it out: you own seven out of forty-seven, split into three rarities from R to SR to SSR, and beyond heroes there are two separate branches, Gods and Spirits. Your battle lineup is five heroes plus one god, you can save five different lineups, and there's an auto-arrange button for the lazy.

Where the game starts squeezing your wallet

I walked into the upgrade screen with 18,000 Gold, planning to push the whole team up a few levels to be safe. Taking a single hero from level 1 to level 5 ate 11,220 Gold, and right after that the next upgrade wanted another 8,230 while I had only 6,780 left. In other words, I'd touched one hero out of seven and was already broke.

The math is brutally simple. Clearing the first stage pays 3,000 Gold, so one hero's sixth level alone costs nearly three replays, and every battle takes ten Bread out of a maximum of sixty. Six runs and you're out and waiting, which is exactly when the top-up packs start looking reasonable.

The ads sit right on the mid-battle button that rerolls your fate cards. One tap plays three videos back to back, about half a minute before you get the reward, and you have to sit through all of it if you want a different set of cards. To be fair, the newer version has dropped the video requirement on the single summon at the Tavern; that button now simply says free.

The mod removes exactly those roadblocks

The MOD menu opens from a red floating button in the left corner and scrolls. The first thing to remember is that most switches need to be on before you launch the game, so after flipping them, quit and reopen; switch them on mid-session and the in-battle numbers stay where they were.

• Summoning Meat never drops has its own slider. I set 99999, and in battle the Meat counter read exactly 99999 instead of 100. I summoned five times in a row, the price climbed from 1 to 5, the units really appeared and lined up on the bench, and the balance didn't move by a single point.
• Battle speed goes from 1 to 10. Without the mod, the speed button on the right side of the screen was stuck at X1 for me no matter how often I tapped it. Set the slider to 6, tap the speed button once in battle, and it reads X6 and the whole battle runs six times faster.
• God Mode for the Fortress is my favorite. On stage two I deliberately didn't put a single unit on the field and let the whole orc horde walk straight into the fence for five waves, boss wave included, and the HP bar stayed at 5,000 out of 5,000.
• Invincible heroes works the same way. I dropped a lone hero into a crowd of a few dozen monsters, and after nearly a minute at six times speed its health bar was still full and green while the boss's bar was slowly draining.
• No ads pays out the moment you tap a watch-an-ad button, without playing any video. I tried the end-of-stage double reward button: the gold doubled exactly as if I had watched the whole clip. The number of uses per day still follows the game's limits.
• Block the anti-cheat check runs in the background. Version 1.0.8 of the game checks battle speed when a battle ends, and anything faster than X3 gets flagged as "Invalid battle" and the stage is lost. With this switch on, sped-up battles still count and pay out as usual.
• Instant win: Campaign and Instant win: Dungeon are the newest additions. Tap Fight on a Campaign stage or Challenge in the Dungeon and the battle ends in a win on the spot, with the same rewards and XP as a real clear. Bread and daily Dungeon attempts are still spent as usual.

The first four switches change the battle completely. Clearing a stage with the Fortress at a full 100% HP is the condition for the best of the three reward chests on each stage. Playing without help, that chest is very hard to reach early on, because your units are still too weak.

What it's like to actually play

The first thing worth praising is how polished it looks. The pixel monsters bunching into a thick mass in front of the fence are a treat to watch, and even at high speed the game runs smoothly on a phone.

The downsides are just as clear. The game makes you sign in to an account and needs a connection to get in. Turn on airplane mode and it freezes on the title screen, so this isn't something to play on a flight or down in a basement. The resource pace is very tight too: almost every couple of sessions you'll be standing in front of a button asking for more Gold or more Rubies.

On the Play Store, Pixel Defenders sat at 4.3 stars from 831 ratings and over 50,000 downloads when I checked. That's a modest number of ratings next to the big names in the genre. But the score matches what I found: a tidy, decently made game that's just a bit stingy with resources.

So who should play it?

If you like tower defense but are tired of placing fixed towers and watching, Pixel Defenders' drag-and-merge system gives you a lot more to do. The fate cards between waves also mean no two runs of the same stage play alike. And since every battle wraps up in five waves, it's great for a few rounds while waiting for the bus or on a lunch break.

And if you once installed it and gave up after losing over and over on stage three or four without enough Gold to level your units, the Meat, speed and Fortress God Mode switches are exactly what get you past that wall. You still place and merge your units yourself; you just stop getting kicked out because your lineup is a few levels behind the wave.