The Battle Cats

The Battle Cats is a lane defense game from PONOS where an army of strange white doodle cats marches across the screen to knock down an enemy base. You pay for each cat with money that ticks up during the fight, and between fights you spend XP to make your cats, your cannon and your income stronger.

What made me stop was a speech bubble. Back at the Cat Base after a few stages, a giant cat at the edge of the screen told me that if I was having trouble, I should repeat stages to get some XP and upgrade my cats. A couple of taps away, the shop was selling a million XP in one pack for $15.99.

That's the whole deal in two screens, so I played it through VipMod with the two switches in its MOD menu, Unlimited XP and Unlimited Cat Food, both of which need VIP 2. Here's how a battle works, where the game starts charging you, what each switch did when I spent with it, and why I'd be careful with the second one.

Send the cats left and keep your own base standing

Every stage is one long horizontal lane. Your cat base, a spotted tower with a box on top, sits on the right, the enemy base sits on the far left, and whoever knocks the other side's base down first takes the stage.

The buttons along the bottom are your army. In my first stages the lineup was a single cat that costs 50¢ and four empty gray slots, so the whole plan was to tap that one cat again and again and hope there were enough of them by the time the enemies showed up.

Stages are named after countries, starting with Korea, and the enemies are as odd as your side. On one Australia stage a scowling white dog, a spotted snake and a little pack of stick men came at me together, and my cats met them in a messy pile in the middle of the lane.

Two round buttons in the corners decide a lot of fights. The Worker Cat on the left raises the cap on your wallet, and at Level 1 the next level cost me 40¢. On a Thailand stage I was sitting on 77¢ out of a 100¢ cap, which isn't even enough for two cats.

So every early fight comes down to one small choice: 40¢ on the Worker Cat now so you have more later, or 50¢ on a cat now so the enemy doesn't stroll up to your base. The Cat Cannon on the right charges while you fight, and once it reads Fire!!, one tap lets it go.

Every win pays XP, and the Upgrade screen spends it

XP is the currency that matters between fights. In the first chapter a win paid me anywhere from 2,000 to 5,600 XP, and the top of that range came from beating the Japan stage.

You spend it on the Upgrade screen, which has a level for each of your cats, for the Worker Cat and for three parts of the Cat Cannon: attack, range and charge. Raising Cat Cannon Attack from Level 1 to 2 cost 500 XP, Level 3 cost 1,000, and Level 4 was already asking for 2,000, with a Half XP sale running at the time.

Beating Japan also opened the Rare Cat Capsule at the Cat Base, which is where the rarer cats come from. One roll costs 150 Cat Food or a Rare Ticket, and around it you'll find the regular Cat Capsule, event capsules, Missions, treasures, a login stamp card and events like the Otherworld Colosseum.

750 Cat Food and a million XP for $15.99

Cat Food is the premium currency, and the game is never shy about selling it. A Party Pack popped up offering 750 Cat Food and 1,000,000 XP for $15.99, under a banner that called it a big bargain on Cat Food for a limited time only.

Put that next to the stage rewards and the gap is huge. At 5,600 XP for my best win, a million XP works out to close to 180 wins of that stage, while 750 Cat Food covers exactly five rolls of the Rare Cat Capsule.

The Power-Up Sale goes higher. Bronze is $19.99 for 900 Cat Food and 50,000 XP, Silver is $39.99 for 1,900 Cat Food and 150,000 XP, and Gold is $79.99 for 4,000 Cat Food and 300,000 XP. Platinum Ticket and Cat CPU packs cost $7.99 each, and Google Play lists in-app items from $0.49 to $146.99.

What gave the pricing away for me is that the $15.99 Party Pack carries more than three times the XP of the $79.99 Gold pack. XP is the part the game hands out cheaply, and the real price sits in the Cat Food.

Losing costs you something too. When your base falls, the Defeat screen offers to set your money to MAX and reload your Cat Cannon for 30 Cat Food, or you can tap Free Continue with Ad and sit through an ad instead. Five of those paid continues add up to one Rare Capsule roll.

Two switches behind the red VIP badge

In VipMod, a red VIP badge sits on the left edge of the screen, and tapping it opens the MOD menu. There are two switches, Unlimited XP and Unlimited Cat Food, both need VIP 2, and the second one comes with a red label warning that it may get your account banned.

Neither switch hands you a pile of currency the moment you flip it. Unlimited XP waits for your first upgrade, so I turned it on with 4,050 XP in the bank, bought one level, and the counter jumped straight to 99,614,720. I bought five more upgrades after that, and it never moved off that number.

Then I wanted to see the switch do its job, so I turned it off and raised Cat Cannon Attack to Level 2, and exactly 500 XP came off, leaving 99,614,220. I switched it back on, bought Level 3 for 1,000, and the counter went right back up to 99,614,720. A 2,000 XP gift I claimed also landed as 99,614,720.

Unlimited Cat Food works the same way: it adds nothing and only stops what you spend from coming off. I had 150 from a Cat Scratcher event, so I lost a battle and paid 30 to continue, and my money filled to MAX and the cannon reloaded while the counter stayed at 150.

With the switch off, the same continue took me from 150 down to 120. Back on, I continued two more battles at 120 and the counter didn't budge. After that I closed the game and opened it again with the internet on, and both numbers were where I'd left them, 99,614,720 XP and 120 Cat Food.

You don't need to root your phone for any of this. A few things to know up front:

• Both switches only stop spending from counting, so the first upgrade and the first Cat Food purchase still come out of what you've got.
• Continuing a lost battle is the only thing I paid for with Cat Food while the switch was on. I didn't roll a capsule or buy anything from the shop with it.
• The mod is made for the version of the game on Google Play right now. When PONOS ships an update, both switches sit idle until we've rebuilt them for the new version.

Why I'd keep the Cat Food switch on a short leash

Cat Food isn't just a number on your phone, because the game's servers keep their own count of it, and that's why the switch carries a ban warning. Your balance stays put, but the continues and rolls you made with it still happened, and the servers have no record of you paying for them.

After using it, I kept an eye on that account for roughly two hours. No warning came up, and nothing was taken back when I reopened the game online. Two hours isn't two weeks, though, and players have reported bans over edited Cat Food before, so I can't promise how the servers will treat it later on.

I also stayed away from Data Transfer and backups on purpose, since that's when your account gets checked against the server. If you want to try it, pick an account you wouldn't miss and leave both alone while the switch is on.

Unlimited XP is a different story. XP isn't one of the items the servers keep track of, which is why it has no warning label in the menu, and it's the switch I'd reach for first.

What changes once XP stops running out

The best thing about this game is how silly it looks. The cats are plain white doodles with tiny faces, the enemies include that grumpy dog and a gang of stick men, and the Victory screen in Japan puts a dark castle behind the word Victory. It has a lot of charm for something this simple.

The downside is how often it stops to sell you something. Sale banners sat on both the Upgrade screen and the Cat Base, and the big cat on the Cat Base kept nudging me back toward replaying the same stages.

With Unlimited XP on, the Upgrade screen stops being a budget. The question becomes which cat or cannon part to raise next rather than whether you can afford it, and that's a much more fun question to answer.

It doesn't play the battles for you, though. Your money in a fight still ticks up at the normal pace, cats still cost what they cost, and the cannon still has to charge. There's nothing in the MOD menu for battle money, cooldowns or energy, so the lane plays exactly as hard as the game made it.

Six languages and a big download before the first stage

The first time you open it, the game asks you to pick a language from English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Thai. Only after that does it start pulling down about 723 MB of game data, so it's worth doing that first launch on Wi-Fi.

You need the internet for that first download, and events and gifts come from the servers as well. I didn't try playing stages with the phone in airplane mode, so I can't tell you how far you'd get without a connection.

On Google Play in the US it holds 4.5 stars from about 620,000 ratings and has passed 10 million downloads. It's rated Teen and free to install.

So who should download it

If you like lane defense and collecting odd little units, this is one of the friendliest takes on it. The rules fit in one sentence, and the fun comes from working out which cats to bring and when to spend the money ticking up in the corner.

And if you've reached the point where every upgrade means replaying the same stage for a few thousand XP, Unlimited XP takes that wall away and leaves the battles alone. Keep Cat Food for an account you don't mind risking, and stay away from Data Transfer while it's on.