Swordash

I started Swordash on a guest account, and within a minute a girl in a sailor uniform was cutting down zombies on a ruined city street. The tutorial run felt great right up to the end of the bridge, where a giant zombie in overalls, with a basketball stuck to his belly, wore my HP down and knocked me out. The game offered a free revive, and I took it, which taught me early that bosses here hit a lot harder than everything that comes before them.

A sword, a dash and a street full of zombies

Swordash is played sideways, with a joystick on the left and a cluster of buttons on the right. The big sword button is your basic attack, and the ghost-shaped one next to it makes you dash out of trouble. Active skills you pick up during a run get buttons of their own, and equipping an ULT disk lights up an ultimate that charges as you fight.

You don't have to figure that out alone, because a blue-haired Liaison pops up at the bottom of the screen to explain each new button the first time it appears. Her lines come in short bursts that you tap through, and she walks you through the lobby menus after your first run as well.

A stage is a string of short rooms. The tutorial stage, A Rookie Coming, had seven, and the counter at the top told me Emergency Service, the next one, had ten. Each room keeps you busy until the zombies are gone, and then a red arrow on the edge of the screen points you onward. Wrecks burn in the background, gold coins spill everywhere, and one bridge room had a red motorcycle parked right in the middle of the fight.

Every room you clear offers three random skills

After each room you clear, the game freezes and deals three skill cards. My first pick was between Max HP +80, an Absorption card that gives basic attacks a 10% chance to heal you and Phantom Saw, an active skill that throws a boomerang blade every 12 seconds. Later picks offered BladeWheel, an orbiting blade that appears when you dash, plus damage reduction, crit rate and stamina boosts.

You can refresh the offer once, so there's a little room to steer a build. The skills vanish when the stage ends, which means every attempt at a stage starts from a clean slate.

Gear, disks and a story map to unlock

Back in the lobby, the Hero tab shows the sword girl with her gear slots around her, and mine sat at 200 attack and 600 HP after the first stage. My first stage dropped an ULT disk called Space Judgement, which adds 200 max HP and gives your ultimate a chance to refund half its energy, and equipping it is what put the ULT button on my screen. Gear goes into a grid with room for 35 pieces, and there are separate tabs for items and relics.

The lobby also keeps a to-do list. The Milepost tab paid me a supply crate for finishing the first mission and then asked me to level the hero to 2 for 1,000 gold, while Daily Tasks, Weekly Tasks and Achievements wait in the tabs underneath.

The Adventure tab is a city map split into chapters, and every stage shows a reward for one, two and three stars. The stars are for clearing the stage, finishing in under six minutes and not dying at all, so my first clear, revive included, only earned one of them.

Five energy per stage, and the store is never far away

Every stage costs 5 energy, and the bar held 20 on my account, so four stages empty it. That's a short session if you're stuck on a hard stage. Even a lost stage pays a little, and giving up on stage 1-2 halfway through still gave me 541 gold.

The defeat screen also offers Once Again, which restarts the stage for another 5 energy and hands back one random skill from the run you just lost. It softens a failed attempt a little, but it's still energy you won't see again for a while.

The store is where the money talk happens. Top-up packs of the purple premium currency run from 80 for $0.99 to 8,000 for $99.99, and each one pays a matching bonus the first time you buy it. A Monthly Card costs $4.99, and an Ads Pass that skips every ad in the game forever costs $9.99. Google Play lists in-app purchases from $0.99 to $99.99 per item.

There's also a Sales tab that restocks on a timer with items for gold, at prices from 5,000 to 40,000. Considering my first win paid about a thousand gold, most of that shelf is a long way off early on.

What the mod does on the street

VipMod adds a red VIP button on the left edge, and tapping it opens the MOD menu. Swordash has three switches, God Mode, Damage multiplier and Fast cooldown, and each one shows a red warning about locked accounts before it turns on. I turned all three on, picked 10 for the damage multiplier, kept the default of 5 for cooldowns and tapped the restart button the menu suggested.

The difference was obvious in the second room of Emergency Service. My basic attack is 200 on the hero screen, and now the numbers over regular zombies read 2,000 and 2,400, so most of them dropped after a swing or two. A crowd of six piled into me, and my HP bar sat at a full 576 for the rest of the run.

The pause menu has a damage chart, and by the fourth room it read 73,200 from basic attacks and 40,000 from Instant Slash. That's a lot of damage for a level 1 hero whose weapon slot was still empty.

A few things to know up front:

• This is an online game with a live anti-cheat. The first thing it shows you is an announcement that promises round-the-clock monitoring and bans, so use a spare account.
• Other players have had accounts blocked from entering stage 3-1 after playing with these switches, and turning the mod off didn't undo it.
• Bosses limit how much a single hit can take off, so the multiplier matters less in a boss room than against regular zombies.

How it played on my screen

The combat is the reason to play. The sword has real weight to it, dashing through a crowd and coming out with a BladeWheel spinning around you is a lot of fun, and the skill cards keep runs from feeling identical. The dark, wrecked city looks good in landscape too, with fire and debris everywhere.

The rough parts are around the edges. The tutorial keeps pointing you at menus with flashing rings, the story chat interrupts the action often, and the first boss is a real difficulty spike for a brand-new character. Four stages per energy bar also means you won't be grinding for long without paying or waiting.

One practical note is that the game starts you on a guest account, and the settings screen offers to link it to Google or Facebook. Link the account you care about and keep a separate guest account for experimenting.

Swordash holds 4.5 stars from about 165,000 reviews on Google Play, with more than 10 million downloads and a Teen rating. The language list is long, with English, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Russian, French, German, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian and Vietnamese.

So who should download it

If you like hack-and-slash action with a roguelite twist, this is one of the better ones on a phone. The controls are simple enough to learn in the tutorial, and the skill picks give each run its own shape.

If you already hit a wall at the first big boss or ran out of energy on a hard stage, the mod clears that wall quickly. Just treat it as something to enjoy on a second account, because this is a game that watches its players and has already blocked accounts that used these switches.