TDS - Tower Destiny Survive

The first lesson TDS - Tower Destiny Survive taught me wasn't how to shoot zombies, it was how to read a price list. The tutorial finger pointed straight at a car-connecting block priced at 50 coins, while my wallet held a grand total of 38.

It's a pretty blunt opening, and it also tells you in advance where most of your playtime will go. Not in battle, but at the upgrade panel standing between you and the next stage.

The tutorial finger points at something I can't afford

The first stage is called Zombie City, and the setting is just what the name says: a street in a ruined city with zombies walking in from the right. Your character sits on a cart with a parasol roof, gun in hand, and that cart doesn't go anywhere.

All the shooting is automatic; you don't aim and you don't move. The only thing you do in battle is tap the three skill cards at the bottom of the screen, each costing a different amount of power.

At the start, the power bar refills 0.2 per second, so the 2-power grenade is almost always available, while the 10-power missile barrage has to be saved up for. That saving up is the entire thinking part of a battle.

A run is two minutes of standing still and taking it

Across the top of the screen is a progress bar with four checkpoints and a red boss head at the end. Each checkpoint is a wave bigger than the last, and between waves the game sends in a few ambulances carrying the plague, with HP counted in the thousands.

The first time I died at the second checkpoint, the next at the third, and I still haven't seen the boss's face. The 20.5-thousand-HP ambulance is where every one of my runs ended, because the zombies flood in faster than the train can chew through them.

The nice part is that losing costs nothing. The game collects every coin you picked up along the way and puts it all in your wallet, so a failed run is still a profitable one, and you return to the upgrade panel with more money than you left with.

The cart is where the real game is

On the base screen, the cart starts out as a single car. You buy blocks to connect more cars, each new car opening three weapon slots priced at 90, 360 and 750 coins, and the higher the price, the heavier the gun you mount.

Each weapon type has its own skill board. Upgrade a gun enough times and the game stops to ask you to pick one of two cards, like firing an extra bullet at reduced damage, or adding a few percent chance of an instant kill.

Blocks evolve the same way. Upgrade HP far enough and the game makes you choose whether the next block is a battery adding 0.3 power per second or a repair block restoring 0.5 percent HP per second for the whole train.

Beyond the cart there's another layer, the character profile, with six talent card slots that unlock at levels 3, 5, 8, 10, 15 and 20. I was only level 1 with 1,208 out of 5,500 XP, so that layer was still completely locked.

Chests, gems and where the game starts asking for money

Coins only cover the cart. Gear for your character comes from chests, and chests cost gems: 15 for a common chest, 35 for a rare, 100 for a legendary, or 900 to open ten at once.

The legendary chest has a countdown stating that you're guaranteed a level 5 rare item after 50 more opens. In other words, on the free-gem path, that number will take a very long time to reach zero.

And free gems really do trickle in. Each day you get two claims of 10 gems, plus three claims of one energy point and one free common chest, all tied to watch-an-ad buttons.

The Shop also has a one-time offer called the No Ads Pack, promising to permanently remove automatic ads and throwing in 40 bonus tickets. That one is a real-money purchase too, so here it's just for show.

Besides gems there are skip tickets and energy, which the game sells directly for real money in bundles of 20, 70 and 140 tickets. Inside VipMod every price slot shows N/A, so nobody can tap one by mistake.

The ads here deserve a section of their own

During battle there's always a banner strip along the bottom edge, and it doesn't eat into the play area because that part is the skill bar anyway. The banner content is all over the place: I saw a crypto exchange and a rather suggestive dating ad in a cartoon game rated for ages 7 and up.

More notable are the full-screen ads after each run. They're usually a playable ad about a minute long, and the close button only appears in the top-right corner after the ad has run through both its gameplay and its install pitch.

Once, the ad just froze there: after more than a minute there was still no close button, and the back button didn't work either. The only way out was to kill the game and reopen it; luckily no progress was lost.

On the other hand, the watch-an-ad reward buttons were surprisingly kind. Tap double coins at the end of a battle, claim 10 gems, open the free chest or take both skill cards, and the reward landed in the wallet right away without any video playing.

With Free Shopping on, the price list becomes decoration

The mod has exactly one switch, called Free Shopping, waiting in the MOD menu in the left corner of the screen. Turn it on, reopen the game once and you're done; there's nothing else to adjust.

The 50-coin block from the start of this article was my first test, and it really arrived while the coin bar stayed at 38. Then came the 90-coin gun, three damage upgrades from 8 to 11 and two HP upgrades from 2 thousand to 4 thousand, all with those same 38 coins.

The most convincing part was the gems. I opened the ten-pack of legendary chests priced at 900 gems with 0 gems in my wallet; ten real items dropped, the guaranteed-rare countdown fell from 60 to 50 opens, and my gem count was still 0.

A few things to know up front so your expectations are right. Your balance never jumps to a nice big number, because the mod blocks the spending step rather than pumping money into your wallet; real-money packs stay at N/A; and the game's ads still run exactly as before.

After a few hours, here's how it feels

What I liked most is the feeling of the cart growing with every run. Going from a pushcart with a torn parasol to a two-car armored train fitted with golden saw blades is progress you can see with your own eyes, and the game draws it very clearly.

There are things to criticize too. The lose, upgrade, lose again loop repeats a little too quickly, and since you control nothing in battle, every failed run looks exactly like the one before, apart from the HP number on the ambulance blocking the road.

You can pick the language right in Settings. No sign-in, no phone number: open it and the game gives you a name and lets you play straight away.

On Google Play the game held 4.4 stars from 292,656 ratings and over 50 million downloads, published by SayGames. Those numbers match how it feels to play: a polished casual game, not something to sink hundreds of hours into.

So who should download it?

If you like games you switch on for a few minutes while waiting, watch a train mow down a sea of zombies on its own and switch off again, this one fits nicely. It doesn't demand reflexes or memorizing skill charts, and a run wraps up in about two minutes.

And if you once installed it and quit because the price list kept blocking you every time you wanted to try a new gun, this mod removes exactly that. I shopped freely all evening without ever waiting on coins, and the train went much further than when I played without help.