Shadow War: Idle RPG Survival

I opened Shadow War expecting the usual idle game, and for the first ten minutes it barely needed me. My dark knight was already cutting through shadow zombies before I had touched the screen, and the only real decision was which Enhance button to tap next. The pause came when I looked at my gems, because the quests paid 100 or 300 at a time while the summon I actually wanted cost 1,500.

Your knight does the fighting, and you buy the numbers

Each stage is a short walk to the right through a crowd of shadow monsters, and your knight swings at whatever stands in front of him on his own. A bar at the top tracks the waves, and its last notch is a skull that marks the boss. Mine was waiting at Normal 1-10, with a timer running under its health bar.

The bottom half of the screen is where you actually play. Attack, Health and Health Regen each have an Enhance button priced in gold, and gold pours in from every kill. For a while I was tapping Attack and Health in turn every few seconds, and the numbers switched to letters so early that my knight was soon hitting for 2A.

A numbered quest scroll sits in the middle of the screen and tells you what to do next, like trying stage Normal 1-7 for 100 gems. It works as a gentle tutorial, and following it is also the fastest way to collect gems in the early stages.

Weapons, armor and skills all come out of the summon screen

Your knight wears a weapon and a piece of armor, and better ones don't drop from monsters. They come from the Summon tab of the shop, where 11 pulls cost 500 gems and 35 pulls cost 1,500. There's also a free batch of 20 pulls if you're willing to watch a video for it, up to three times a day.

Skills work the same way. My first pull gave me a Fury Fairy skill for the opening slot, and a second slot opened when I reached Normal 2-1. Pets have their own summon box too, but it stays grayed out until quest 36.

Every summon also fills a level bar for that box. My gear box needed 70 pulls to climb from level 2 to level 3, and the bar for the next level asked for 105, so the boxes improve slowly unless you keep feeding them gems.

A login calendar, a wheel and a screen that keeps fighting while you sleep

Around the battle there's the usual daily routine. The seven-day login event gives a weapon on day one and 2,000 gems on each of the next five days. Day seven brings an S-rank hero called Hector, the Steelblade Mercenary. A Fortune Wheel adds five spins a day with gem prizes, but only the first spin is free and the rest ask for a video.

Daily Quests pay 200 gems for jobs like defeating 100 enemies or summoning 10 times, and a weekly track adds bigger gem rewards as the points pile up. The best-paying daily task on my list was simply watching two ads, which was worth 1,000 gems on its own.

My favorite touch was sleep mode. The screen goes almost black with a big clock and the words "In the battle" under it. The fight carries on underneath, so I came back to find my knight had moved from Normal 3-1 to 3-2. You slide a bar to wake it up, and there's an Auto Sleep Mode switch in the settings that comes turned on.

One more freebie is worth knowing about. The Google Play listing prints a coupon code, WELCOMESW, and typing it into the Coupon box in the settings added 10,000 gems to my account in a couple of seconds.

Gold piles up, but gems are always short

Gold was never my problem, since every stage threw more of it at me than the Enhance buttons could soak up. Gems are a different story. Quest scrolls pay 100 to 300 and a daily quest pays 200, while one 35-pull summon costs 1,500. In other words, a single big pull is worth roughly ten quests.

The shop is built around that gap. The Bundles tab sells a Hero Pack with 30,000 gems and a Mysterious Pack with 48,000 gems for $11.99 each. Over in the Special tab, a 28-day Membership costs $4.99 and a Remove Ad Pack costs $16.99. Your very first purchase of anything also unlocks a bonus hero, Lucius the Wolfborne Claw, which is a strong nudge to spend something early.

The free route runs through videos. A Great Chance popup offered Ashley, another S-rank hero, for three ads, and the double-speed button in the corner asks for a video once its timer runs out. Some later daily quests even show a video button where Claim should be. The first one I tapped played two ads back to back, close to half a minute, before its 500 gems arrived.

What the mod changed once I restarted

VipMod puts a red VIP button on the left edge of the game screen, and tapping it opens the MOD menu with five switches. I turned all of them on. Max damage and Free shop packs only kick in on a fresh start, so I used the restart button the menu offers and was back at Normal 2-1 about half a minute later.

The difference showed on the very first wave. Every normal swing now landed for 999.99TT, so monsters and bosses dropped as soon as they walked into range. Over the next ten minutes, including a short nap in sleep mode, I went from Normal 2-1 to Normal 3-7.

Unlimited money and gems showed up on the upgrade panel. I tapped Attack thirty times and took it from level 80 to 110, and my gold kept climbing because nothing was being taken out. Then I ran three of the 35-pull summons, two for gear and one for skills, and the gem counter didn't move from 4,200.

Free shop packs was the switch I was most curious about. Tapping the price on the Mysterious Pack opened a reward screen with 48,000 gems and 33 keys, and my gems jumped to 52,200. Lucius arrived right after as the first-purchase bonus, and the Hero Pack did the same thing a minute later, taking me to 82,200.

A few things to know up front:

• Max damage only boosts normal attacks, and I could still see my skill hitting for its usual numbers right next to the 999.99TT ones.
• Max damage and Free shop packs need that restart after you flip them, while the other three switches work the moment you turn them on.
• With Max damage on, nothing lived long enough to hurt me, so I never really needed God Mode, though it's there for bosses that outlast your damage.

How it played on my screen

The good part is how little friction there is. Stages flow into each other without loading screens, and the art has a moody ink-and-shadow look with big red slash effects. The quest scroll always tells you what to tap next, so I never felt lost, and sleep mode is a genuinely clever idea for a game you're meant to leave running.

The weaker part is the clutter. By chapter 3 there were red exclamation marks on almost every icon, plus popups for login rewards, the wheel and the ad-for-a-hero offer. Three of the six bottom tabs were still locked, too. Without the mod, the gem math also means your summon boxes level up at a crawl, and that's where most of your power comes from.

Shadow War holds 4.8 stars from about 115,000 reviews on Google Play, with more than a million downloads and a Teen rating. The language menu lists 14 options, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese.

So who should download it

If you like idle RPGs where the fun is watching the numbers climb, this is an easy one to keep running in the background, and sleep mode makes that literal. It doesn't ask much of you beyond tapping Enhance and claiming rewards, so it suits short sessions between other things.

Maybe you already played it and stalled because every summon felt ten quests away. The mod is aimed squarely at that wall. With gems that never go down and packs that open for free, you can fill your skill slots and gear boxes on the first day and spend your time seeing how far the campaign really goes.