Shadow Slayer: Demon Hunter

I went into Shadow Slayer with fairly modest expectations. Another silhouette hack-and-slash, I thought; play a few stages to get a feel for it and move on. Yet the very first stage of Chapter 1 kept me longer than planned. That supposedly easy stage ate nearly five minutes and in the end gave me just one star out of three.

That wasn't because the monsters were too strong, but because the game never gives you a second to breathe. Three waves pour in at their own pace, a countdown timer sits in the right corner, and each of your two characters has only a little over four hundred HP.

Three waves, one timer and two health bars

A stage plays out on a flat side-scrolling plane, and you run back and forth between the two ends of the map, clearing one wave before you're allowed on to the next. The joystick is on the left; on the right are the slash, dash and jump buttons and a few skill slots still wearing padlocks.

The slashing feels great; every hit splashes blood across the background. A combo counter appears in the left corner and keeps climbing as long as you keep slashing, but the monsters don't stand still while you show off.

What killed me most on that first stage wasn't the sword-wielders. It was the archers standing way out at the edge of the frame and shooting in, while I was too busy slashing to notice them. Cedric's HP fell from 410 to 19 in about a minute.

Luckily the game has a way out built in, and it's also its best mechanic. You bring two hunters into every stage, and when one is running low on HP you tap the other's portrait to swap. The newcomer charges in with an entrance attack and a completely full health bar.

I swapped to Eleanor and instantly had 336 fresh HP, plus a hammer blow that cleared everything crowding around me. The three star criteria are winning, finishing within 120 seconds and keeping HP above thirty percent, so a well-timed swap is both how you survive and how you earn stars.

Six hunters, and the one you want most is behind a padlock

Open the hunter roster and you'll see Cedric, Mirianne, Aasmund, Leonard, Althea and Eleanor. Each has their own weapon icon and a rank shown right under their name. Cedric and Mirianne are A rank and the next three are S rank, but all of them start at level one.

Cedric is the last survivor of a mercenary clan slaughtered by demons. The game tells that story neatly in the character description, without making you read a long block of lore. Each hunter also has their own skill set: Cedric dashes in with launching slashes, while Eleanor swings a holy hammer, slow but painful.

The letdown is that the Summon button in the lobby's left corner stays padlocked while your account is level one. Right underneath, the game has already hung a very inviting flash-sale banner. To get more hunters you have to level up by fighting, or take the back door through the events panel, where Hunter Eleanor is sold on her own for 14.99.

Beyond the campaign, a tower and a dungeon wait under lock

The main lobby lays out five game mode tiles: Campaign, Hell Tower, Endless Dungeon, Boss Raid and a duel mode. At the start only Campaign is lit up; the other four each have a small padlock in the middle of the picture.

The campaign is divided into chapters, and chapter one, the Ancient City of Grandore, stretches into a row of stages numbered 1-1, 1-2 and so on, scrolling right past stage seven. Below the row is a milestone bar counted in total stars, and every fifteen stars opens a chest.

The row of buttons at the bottom of the lobby is where you'll spend most of your time later on: Costumes, Rune Stones, Hunters, Inventory, Skills, Quests and Forge. The Skills panel lets you upgrade each move with Gold, three hundred Gold for the first level, and each move caps at level one hundred.

Entering a stage costs keys rather than a wait on a recharge timer. The fight button says plainly that it takes ten keys, and my key bar was at twenty out of twenty. Do the division and you get exactly two stage runs in a row, after which you have to wait for the bar to fill up again.

Where the game starts eyeing your wallet

Power here comes almost entirely from the gear that drops after each stage, not from character level. Reaching level two gave me just seven damage and eight HP. But the sword that dropped at the end of the first stage took my damage from 29 to 124 with a single tap of the equip button.

When your biggest lever is random drops, and random drops depend on how many times you replay old stages, the Shop naturally becomes the shortcut. And it's a big Shop: the resources section alone splits into Gems, Gold and Keys, alongside Monthly Cards, a Growth Fund and a Hunter Shop.

Gem prices run from 0.99 for 105 Gems up to 99.99 for 13,000. Gems can then be exchanged for Gold on a separate table, 200 Gems for 120,000 Gold. And Gold is a bottomless pit, because every skill level of every hunter needs it.

The heaviest hitters are the two monthly cards, the standard one at 4.99 and the super one at 9.99. They don't just pay out a lump of resources when you buy them; they keep dripping more every day for a month. So players who buy the cards pull away from those who don't very quickly, within just a few weeks.

To be fair, the game still leaves a few free ways to get resources. Every day you get three ad views for twenty Gems each, three more for thirty thousand Gold, plus a five-times Gold button on the victory screen. The 28-day check-in calendar is generous too; day one alone gives twenty-five thousand Gold.

The mod removes the exact button that's blocking you

The VipMod MOD menu floats as a small red button right next to the game frame. Tap it and you get a panel with exactly two switches, one called Free shop packs and one called Skip tutorial, both waiting for you to flip them on when the mod has just downloaded. Whichever you turn on runs, and the next time you open the game it's still set the way you left it.

I did two opposite runs to be sure, because one nice number on its own proves nothing. With the first switch off, I reopened the game, went to the Shop and tapped the 0.99 gem pack. The button just spun for a moment and that was it; Gems stayed at 1,650.

Then I switched it on, reopened the game again and tapped the same pack. Gems jumped to 1,755, exactly the 105 on the label. I also tried the Standard Monthly Card and got 500 Gems and 250,000 Gold, plus the daily gifts for the remaining twenty-nine days.

But a big number on the resource bar still doesn't prove the mod works, so I took those Gems and actually spent them. In the Gold section of the Shop, I traded 200 Gems for the 120,000 Gold pack; the game asked one confirmation question and delivered right away.

Gems dropped to 1,555 and Gold climbed to 395,000. Modded currency really can be spent; it's not a decorative number. A few things to know up front so your expectations are right:

• The switch only takes effect from the next game launch. Turn it off mid-session and packs keep arriving as before until you restart.
• The second switch only matters for brand-new accounts. On an account that's already been through the tutorial, turning it on changes nothing.
• The game's server can still ban accounts. Don't buy dozens of packs in one sitting; spread a few out each day to stay safe.

Pull the plug and the game still runs a full stage

The store listing carries an offline-play label, and plenty of games slap that on for fun, so I tested it from scratch. With the phone's connection completely cut, I opened the game: the title screen still showed, the main lobby still loaded and the Shop still displayed all its prices.

Then I played all of stage 1-1 completely offline. I got through all three waves, won in the fourth minute and received the full 500 Gold, 20 Gems and a dropped sword. The level-up screen and the new-skill unlock screen both showed up normally, so this really is a game you can take on a plane.

Even more interesting, the buy-pack button works offline too. I tapped the 0.99 pack again with the connection cut, and Gems still went up by exactly 105. Only the leaderboard-related stuff is worth saving for when you have signal.

What I liked and what bugged me

What kept me around longest was the art: hand-painted backgrounds in cold grays, with dead trees, a full moon and ruined wooden houses. Characters are black silhouettes outlined in red, and every time the second wave pours in, the whole frame turns red like an alarm.

The sound is clean and sharp too; you hear every sword strike on armor clearly instead of a muddle of noise. My phone is on the weak side, and the game still ran smoothly on low settings. The settings offer three quality levels and let you turn off weapon effects separately if your phone struggles.

There's a language selector in the settings, and the publisher is a studio based in Hanoi, Vietnam.

Two things annoyed me, and the first is those archers at the edge of the frame. They shoot while backing away, so sometimes I ran the length of the map twice and still hadn't finished off a wave. The second is that the game has no Google or Facebook sign-in button.

Saving lives in the settings as two buttons, save and load, so you have to remember to tap them yourself. On the app store, the game held 4.5 stars from over 51,000 ratings and more than five million downloads. The complaints that come up most in the reviews are exactly those two things.

So who should install it?

If you like side-scrolling hack-and-slash and want something light to play in fifteen-minute bursts, this is a pleasant pick. It doesn't make you learn any convoluted systems: jump in and slash, slashing gets you gear, and gear makes you visibly stronger on the very next stage.

And if you once downloaded it and gave up around chapter three or four because it felt like hitting a wall, the mod removes the exact button that stopped you. With plenty of Gems and Gold you can get back to where you stalled without glancing at the Shop. The slashing is still all you, same as before.