Turnaround Adventure

I downloaded Turnaround Adventure thinking it was yet another compact little tower defense game to kill time with. One wave into my first run I knew I had guessed wrong, because the campfire in the middle of the board had already dropped from 101 HP to 28. By the second wave it had gone out completely, and the game threw up a glaring red panel that said "Revive".

Under that word is a watch-an-ad button, and if you landed on this page because you just got stopped right there, I know exactly how that feels.

This write-up follows one real play session, from the first wave until the fire went out. We opened every shop to check the prices, then turned on each switch in the MOD menu and tapped through everything again to see which ones actually work.

The campfire has just 101 HP, and it doesn't heal

Everything in Turnaround Adventure revolves around a campfire sitting right in the middle of the screen. Your only job is to keep it from going out, while the girl in the red cloak handles the fighting herself.

Monsters come out of the edge of the forest from all four directions: first some rats, then packs of wild dogs, then knife-wielding goblins and zombies in soccer jerseys, all of them heading straight for the fire to gnaw on it.

What makes the game harder than I expected is that the campfire's HP doesn't refill between waves. In one run I went into wave one with 101 HP and came out of it with exactly 14, and that 14 was everything I had to carry into wave two.

To be fair, the game does pay extra coins when you keep the fire untouched. But that's also why one botched wave drags down every wave after it.

Three cards a turn, nine tiles to fill

Between waves the game pauses. A little shop opens on the lower half of the screen with exactly three cards, and you get a few seconds to spend the coins you just picked up.

I was offered the Cloudpiercer arrow for 11 coins and a Speed Up card at 3.2x for 14. A 2 percent shield also cost 14, while a card that adds 10 HP to the fire cost just 8. Every run starts with 50 coins, so from the very first purchase you're choosing between hitting harder and lasting longer.

Once you buy a card, you drag it onto one of the nine tiles around the campfire. Placement is where the fun is, because the girl runs laps around the three-by-three board following arrows painted on the floor, and weapons close to her route fire a lot more.

The top-right corner tile is locked, though, and the text on it says you have to clear wave six to open it. In other words, for the early game those eight tiles are all you have to work with.

The "Free" button under the shop rerolls the cards once at no cost, and from the second time on it costs 3 coins. The "Resume" button next to it sends the next wave onto the board, and a chapter has six waves like that. The red skull at the end of the progress bar tells you the last wave is a boss.

Outside battle, a patch of forest packed with buttons

Leave a battle and you land on the main screen, a forest clearing with the campfire and the girl in the middle. Both edges of the screen are lined with icons, so many that the first look is a bit overwhelming.

On the left there's a 7-day check-in, a bounty mission board, a seasonal soccer event and offline rewards. On the right are playtime rewards, a daily gift pack, a treasure hunt, a wishing altar and ad-free tickets.

Across the top are the three resources you'll keep hearing about for the rest of this article. Gold buys weapon shards in the market, and diamonds open chests and trade for gold. Ad-free tickets are what you spend instead of sitting through a whole video.

Chapter 1 has two difficulty levels, Easy and Elite, and the five tabs along the bottom lead to the shop, inventory, battle, character and dungeon. I'm still on the first chapter, so I can't tell you yet what the dungeon opens up.

And this is where the game starts making things hard

The Daily Shop has eight slots and refreshes once a day. The first three are usually freebies or things you get by watching an ad, and the last five are where it hurts your wallet.

I saw a bundle of 15 Starfall Sword shards priced at 405 gold, while a new player's wallet held just 75 gold. A bundle of 15 Talisman shards wanted 285 diamonds, and I was holding exactly 15.

The legit route to gold is the Coin counter just below, where the game gives away 500 gold a day. If you want more, you have to trade 500 diamonds for 2,500 gold.

A bit of simple division shows the problem right away: at 500 free gold a day, you'd have to save for almost a week to afford a few shard bundles, and a few bundles still won't take a weapon to a high level.

The treasure chests are one notch more annoying, because their price keeps climbing. The first chest of the day is free, the next one costs 30 diamonds, and right after I opened it the button changed to 40 diamonds. The real-money packs run from $0.99 all the way up to $99.99.

Die and you get an ad button, and the ads here are long

When the campfire goes out, the game doesn't kick you out right away. The Revive panel opens with two choices: give up, or watch a video to restore the fire to full HP and get 30 extra coins.

Sounds nice, but when I tried it, it wasn't that smooth. The video finished and rolled straight into a playable ad, and that ad refused to close no matter how many times I pressed back.

The battle speed-up button in the top-right corner follows exactly the same formula. The game says watching one video turns on fast speed for this run, and you have to watch ten more to keep it permanently.

This is the kind of design players call "grinding with your eyes". The time you put in isn't spent in battle, it's spent watching ads roll by.

What the mod unlocks

The MOD menu in this mod has only two rows. You open it with the red octagonal MOD button floating in the top-left corner, and both switches sit in the VIP 1 tier.

The first row is "Free shopping", with a slider to choose the level. The second row is "Paid packs: claim for free", and it does exactly what its name says.

I turned that switch on, went to the shop and tapped the $0.99 diamond pack. The game immediately showed the "Congratulations on winning" banner and dropped 2,000 diamonds into my wallet, without opening any payment window.

Then I tapped the $19.99 permanent ad-free ticket pack. This time the effect showed up right in battle: the Revive panel swapped its video icon for a ticket icon, and from then on a single tap revived me instantly with nothing to watch.

Both the diamonds and the ad-free status were still there after I closed the game and opened it again. That's what I like most about this switch, because it isn't a pretty number that only lives for one session.

"Free shopping" didn't work when I first tested it: I tried the 405-gold shard bundle with a 75-gold wallet and the game still said I was short of gold. A later update to the mod fixed it, and we measured it again on Sep 3.

On the "Shopping only" level, a bundle of 15 Cloudpiercer shards priced at 540 gold went through while the wallet stayed at 635 gold, the shard count went from 17 to 32 and the slot turned into "Sold Out". A treasure chest priced at 70 diamonds left the wallet at 378 and still opened to 100 gold plus shards. On the "Everything" level, the 10,000-gold bag at 1,500 diamonds went through with only 378 diamonds in the wallet: gold went from 735 to 10,735 and the diamonds didn't move.

There are three things worth knowing so you don't expect the wrong thing. First, sometimes you have to tap a paid pack two or three times before it registers, because the first tap after opening the shop often gets ignored.

Second, once a diamond pack has landed in your wallet, the other packs usually stay silent for the rest of that session. The safe move is to go straight for the biggest pack you want.

Third, everything the mod gives you is resources stored on your own device. So don't expect it to change your rank on leaderboards or in seasonal events.

So how does it play

My favorite part is the three-by-three board. It turns a familiar tower defense setup into a placement puzzle with real weight to it.

Which tile gets the arrow, which one you save for a speed card, whether to give up a precious tile for an HP card: all of that has to be decided in a few seconds before the next wave pours in. The gloomy fairy-tale art style is easy on the eyes too, and a mid-range phone runs it smoothly without any stutter.

What I didn't like is just as clear. Ads show up on almost every reward button, and prices in the Daily Shop are way beyond what a new player earns.

The language list is short: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English. For English speakers that's all you need, and there isn't much text in the game anyway, since the icons carry most of it.

On Google Play the game holds about 4.6 stars from more than 22,000 ratings and has passed 500,000 downloads. That's enough to say the gameplay has won over quite a lot of people.

One player review sums it up in a few words that I agree with: no internet needed. I switched the connection off entirely and played a full wave, revive screen included, and everything ran normally.

So who should download it

If you like tower defense but you're tired of planting towers along a path, Turnaround Adventure's nine-tile board is a twist worth trying. It's also compact enough to play one-handed while you wait for the bus.

It'll suit you too if you often play without a connection. The game drops you straight into battle with no login and no waiting on a server, so you can play the moment you open it.

And if you installed it once and quit because every death meant sitting through a long ad, the mod here removes exactly that button. Once you've claimed the permanent ad-free ticket pack, reviving becomes one clean tap and the whole run flows much better.

With "Free shopping" on, the Daily Shop prices stop being a wall too. Just remember that the game's daily purchase limits still apply, and that upgrades outside the shop still cost what they normally do.