Titan Rush

The first time you open Titan Rush, nobody sits you down for a long story. You drop straight into a city flooded up to its rooftops. In the top-left corner there's a bright red 100, and that's how many monsters you have to clear before you get to think about anything else.

We cleared all 100 in thirty-seven seconds, and it felt so easy that we were ready to write this up as a game you play just to keep your hands busy. On the fourth stage, when the power comparison came up and our number was lower than the monsters', that thought went straight out the window.

One finger drag does it all, dragging it right is the hard part

A battle here is surprisingly compact. You put a finger on the screen and drag, the Titan swings its guns that way and fires on its own, and you never have to press a fire button once.

The Chimera swarms, the game's red monsters, keep coming in groups from the far end. They aren't fast, but there are a lot of them, and if you leave your finger in one spot, the ones circling the outside slip past and latch right onto the Titan's legs.

The nice part is that every battle is short. We timed a few runs, and a normal stage lands somewhere between forty seconds and a minute and a half, short enough to play while you wait for an elevator without leaving it half-finished.

The end of each chapter changes the rhythm, because you have to take down a building-sized Chimera with four health bars. At that point each of our bullets shaved off just seventeen HP from nearly a thousand, so the fight suddenly drags on and you're forced to dodge instead of standing still and shooting.

The Titan sprouts new guns mid-battle

What kept us hooked longest in the first few stages were the orange supply crates scattered along the route. Sweep your guns across a crate and it bursts open, and a new cluster of launchers instantly sprouts on the Titan's shoulders.

By the middle of the stage both shoulders were packed with eight clusters, and the shots poured out in orange streaks across most of the screen. Some crates even release a swarm of small yellow robots that line up in front of the Titan and fire alongside you until the battle ends.

That makes every battle build up in a very satisfying way. For the first thirty seconds you're picking off monsters one at a time, thirty seconds later you're standing inside a wall of firepower that clears the whole screen on its own, and that feeling is easy to get hooked on.

Sydney is underwater, and you're standing on its roof

Outside of battle, the game opens onto a stretch of sea seen from above. It took us a moment to realize that the white sails poking out of the water in the bottom corner were the Sydney Opera House.

The whole play area is a flooded bay ringed by sea walls, with abandoned oil rigs and high-rises that only show their top few floors above the water. Each step of a chapter is a glowing dot on the route, and your Titan wades from one dot to the next.

This part is called the Expedition, and it's the backbone of the game. Finish a chapter and a new one opens, along with a new Commander joining your squad, so there's always a reason to push one more step.

At the bottom of the bay, a shelter is slowly falling apart

Tap the buoy floating in the middle of the sea and the screen sinks below the surface to show your shelter. It's an underground complex several floors deep, and the first time we went down, almost every floor was still locked.

The first room you can open is the Control Center, flooded up to the chests of the two people standing in it. Repairing it costs thirty-three minerals and thirty-three oil, and in return your Commanders' level cap rises to five and each of them gets five hundred extra HP.

This is where the game hides its real strategy. Your strength in battle doesn't come from how skillfully you drag your finger, it comes from how far you've rebuilt that shelter at the bottom of the sea.

Next to it is a long milestone board listing what you have to achieve to open new areas. The first milestone asks for three Commanders on hand and for you to clear the next chapter, so fighting and building keep pulling each other along.

What blocks you earliest, though, is the small stamina bar at the top, which starts at one hundred and twenty points. Every Expedition run eats part of it, and once it's empty, all you can do is wait for it to fill back up.

Then comes the stage where your squad is exactly 204 points short

Before each battle the game lays out a power comparison, blue for you and red for the monsters. There are five slots for Commanders, but early on only two are open and the other three are padlocked.

We hit a stage where the red side read 21,200. With one Commander slotted in, the blue side came to 20,996, exactly two hundred and four points short, and we really did lose after more than a minute and a half of watching.

Adding a second Commander pushed our number up to 38,489, and that battle was won cleanly in forty seconds. Same stage, same way of playing, and the only difference was whether you had enough Commanders.

From then on, what the game is selling you is Commanders. Some locked slots are waiting on shelter upgrades, high-tier Commanders sit inside paid packs, and the packs here cost $0.99 to $199.99 per item on the US Google Play store.

What the mod fixes, and what it can't do yet

When you run the game through VipMod, you'll see a red MOD button floating on the left edge of the screen. Tap it for a small panel with two switches, and after flipping one, quit the game and open it again once so it takes effect.

The switch that works well is "Game speed x2". We played the same stage twice, same lineup, hands off the screen both times: without it the run took ninety-three seconds, with it just forty-four.

To be fair, it speeds up the whole game rather than just the battles, so dialogue and travel scenes fly by as well. On the other hand, the clocks the server keeps, like construction and stamina refill, still crawl along at their usual pace.

The second switch started out as "God mode", promising that a battle would never count as a loss. We turned it on and replayed the stage we had just lost, still with a single Commander, and the defeat screen came up anyway after ninety-one seconds.

So we reworked it and renamed it after what it really does: "Block defeat screen (heroes still fall)". The game no longer shows the defeat screen when your whole squad goes down, but HP still drains and fallen heroes stop shooting, so if everyone falls, the stage just freezes until you leave the battle yourself. It isn't invincibility, and we haven't managed real invincibility for this game yet.

What it's like to actually play, beyond the numbers

The visuals clearly had money spent on them. The Titan is modeled with real heft, the sea has proper waves, and the short cutscenes between chapters, showing a giant machine lying broken underwater, look far better than everything else.

Our test phone was set to Vietnamese, which the game supports down to the character dialogue, so that's the language you'll see in the screenshots on this page.

On the other hand, the game opens up a little slowly. Of the five feature tabs along the bottom of the screen, four are still padlocked, and opening them takes several more rounds of shelter upgrades.

One thing to know up front: the game needs a connection the whole time. We tried cutting the connection and reopening it, and it stopped right at the loading screen with a message about an unstable network, still stuck there on the tenth retry.

On Google Play the game has passed a million downloads and holds about 4.7 stars from close to 30,000 ratings. It carries a Teen rating, mostly, we'd guess, because of how little some of the female characters are wearing.

So who should download it

If you like base-building strategy but can't stand the games that make you babysit them for hours, Titan Rush is a good fit. Battles are short, you only need one finger to drag, and the building side behind them is still deep enough to give you something to plan.

And if you gave up right at that power comparison screen, knowing you were a few hundred points short with no way to make it up that day, the speed switch at least lets you grind back twice as fast. It won't win for you, but it gives you back half your time.