Zombie War Idle Defense

We opened Zombie War Idle Defense expecting a light tower defense game: shoot a few dozen zombies, then put the phone down and go to bed. The first fifteen minutes really are like that. The tutorial walks you through every step, and in the first three stages the crossbow on the wall more or less wins by itself.

Then we opened the hero screen, planning to level Pavel up a few times to be safe. The game answered with a line of yellow text right under the level-up button: a hero's level can't exceed the Castle level. Meaning that if you want strong troops you have to build first, and every Castle upgrade costs exactly 150 gold more than the one before.

You sit on the wall, and the zombies just keep walking down the road

Each stage is an asphalt road seen from above, with zombies at the top and your wall at the bottom. On the wall there's a mounted crossbow with up to two heroes standing beside it, all firing automatically at their own pace. Your job is to tap the screen to aim, so the shot lands where the crowd is thickest.

The wall's HP bar runs along the bottom of the screen, and it doubles as the star rating. Keep the wall almost intact and you get three stars; let the zombies chew through most of it before you win and you get just one. So you may have to replay the same stage a few times to collect enough stars for the chests.

Next to the HP bar is a 100-point Energy bar, and that's what really decides a battle. Pavel's firebomb costs 30, a grenade costs 25, and the crossbow's piercing shot costs 30. Run out of energy just as a big crowd arrives, and all you can do is watch.

There's an Auto button in the right corner for the lazy, and we left it on for most of the session. The auto-aim isn't bad, but it never fires a skill at the right moment when a pack of zombie dogs charges in, so the harder stages still need your hands.

Nearly twenty heroes, six elements, and a third spot locked until Castle level 40

The hero roster has nearly twenty faces across six elements: fire, grass, lightning, water, light and dark. Each one brings their own active skill and their own upgrade tree. You collect their shards from end-of-stage rewards, and once you have enough you unlock a new hero.

What we like about this part is that you drag heroes between the spots on the wall before a battle. Position really matters, because whoever stands near the outer edge takes hits first. On the other hand the game is stingy with spots: you start with just one, the second opens at Castle level 10, and the third waits all the way until level 40.

Each hero also has their own wardrobe, 57 outfits in total split into R, SR and SSR ranks. The notable thing is that outfits here aren't just for show, because the more you own, the more stats the Collection Bonus panel adds to your whole team. The game itself does point out, though, that those stats only apply in turn-based modes.

Outside battle, a base and a clock that runs on its own

Outside the stages, the thing you'll build up most is the Castle, meaning the wall at the end of the road. It goes from level 1 to level 200, and every level adds HP and defense. At levels 20, 70, 120 and 180 the Castle unlocks another passive, such as emergency healing or a self-generating shield.

The campaign map is divided into Areas of about twenty stages each, and each Area has a 60-point star bar with three chests hanging at 20, 40 and 60. The deeper you go, the faster money flows in on its own. At stage 1-6, for example, the card shows 102 gold per minute, 16 experience per minute and 26 stars per hour.

That's where the idle part lives: you close the game, go to work, and come back to a pile of gold waiting for you. But it also means that to raise your income you have to push stages, to push stages you need gold for Castle upgrades, and that loop tightens from Area 2 onward.

Besides the campaign there are six other modes under the Challenge tab. Gold Hunt and Boss Hunt open at stage 2-1, World Boss at 2-10, Hero Arena at 3-11, the Dungeon at 3-21 and King's Tower at 4-1. They all stay greyed out until you clear the stage listed, so for the first few days the campaign is all you have to play.

And this is where the game starts asking you to open your wallet

The first Castle upgrade costs 700 gold, the next 850, then 1,000, rising by 150 every level. Going from level 1 to level 10 already eats nearly 12,000 gold. Meanwhile a three-star stage win pays just 2,000 gold, so you'll replay a few old stages just to afford the construction.

Promoting heroes draws on two currencies at once, gold and stars, and stars trickle in very slowly at a few dozen an hour. Raising the max Energy bar needs gems instead, 50 for the first level and more after that, and gems are exactly the currency the game sells directly.

In battle, if you run out of energy halfway, there's a button that refills it instantly for 10 gems, usable three times per battle. After each stage win there's also a button that multiplies your gold by five, and that button comes with a video ad.

The shop is split into three tabs and sells items from $0.99 to $99.99. The easiest pack to justify is probably the $2.99 currency pack with 500,000 gold and 250 gems. If you planned to grind that much gold from the idle income at stage 1-6, it works out to about 82 hours straight.

The mod pulls that gold button right off

Our mod has three switches, inside the red MOD panel floating at the left edge of the screen. All three are best turned on before you launch the game, since switching them on mid-session usually doesn't take.

The first switch is "Freeze resources", and it blocks every way your money gets deducted, all at once. We hit the Castle upgrade nine times in a row to go from level 1 to level 10. Defense jumped from 0 to 60 and the wall's HP rose to 1,337, while our gold stayed at 15,000, exactly where it was before we pressed anything.

The second switch is "Free pack purchases", and it worked with every type of pack we tried. The $2.99 currency pack paid out the full 500,000 gold and 250 gems. The $4.99 materials pack, the $9.99 Hero Wish pack, the Monthly Membership pack and even the permanent Remove Ads pack all came through for real, and Google's payment window never showed up once.

The bonus that comes with it is surprisingly nice: once you own Remove Ads, the five-times-gold button at the end of a stage turns into a straight claim. One tap and 2,000 gold became 8,000 without a single second of ads.

The third switch is "Unlock all skins", and the Outfits panel jumps from empty to 57 of 57. The real value is in the Collection Bonus panel next to it, where the full set gives the whole team 22% attack, 14% HP, 14% defense, 18% crit and 15% crit resistance.

Three things worth knowing so you don't expect the wrong thing:

• Freezing only blocks deductions and never adds anything, so you still need a bit of starting money before you can spend freely.
• The hero level cap tied to the Castle level is a hard rule of the game. The mod can't break it, it only lets you raise the Castle faster.
• The unlocked outfits are an answer given on your side of the game, not items sitting in your inventory on the server, so turning the switch off puts everything back the way it was.

After a full session, what's good and what gets old

The clearest plus is how easy it is to get into. No login, no phone number, you open it and play right away. You only need to link Facebook if you want to save your account, and there's a gift code box for anyone who hunts codes.

The Options menu offers 15 languages. We played in Vietnamese, which is why the screenshots here show Vietnamese text, and that translation was done with care, from skill names down to the level-cap warning, rather than run through a machine. We also tried cutting the connection completely and playing a full stage. The game still loaded, still let us win and still paid out, and only the events board and the Guild icon disappeared.

What gets old is just as clear. The combat repeats quickly, since every road is straight and every zombie walks. By the tenth stage you've switched on Auto and turned to something else. Most of the interesting content is locked behind stage milestones that are pretty far off, so the first session doesn't offer much choice.

On Google Play, Zombie War Idle Defense holds 4.44 stars from more than 85,000 ratings and has passed 10 million downloads. Those are pretty convincing numbers for a fairly low-profile title.

So who should download it

If you like setting things up and then sitting back to watch, and you enjoy coming home to a bag of gold waiting on your phone, this is an easygoing choice. It doesn't ask for reflexes, and in exchange you have to put up with battles that all look much alike.

And if you installed Zombie War Idle Defense before and gave up because of that Castle upgrade loop, this mod removes exactly that roadblock. You want strong heroes, so you upgrade the Castle, and upgrading the Castle drains all your gold. Turn on "Freeze resources", push the Castle up a few dozen levels in a minute, then get back to the part of the game it actually wants you to play.