
This is a necessity, since the inventory remains teeny-tiny for a good long time. No need to teleport back to a safe village or finish the current map before getting your salvage reward, just pick something up, click sell, and that's that. You can even craft items, socket them for the myriad of jewels that you will collect, and the best part? You can sell items at any point. The loot is plentiful, and the different modifying effects of armor, jewelry, and weapons is enough to equate this to a fairly sophisticated PC game system. You can't put a price on that feeling being just ten seconds away in your pocket.

The first few levels will feel repetitive, but once these slots are filled, it's easy to feel like a genius for combining these runes together in a devastating volley that compresses a wide spread of undead bastards to one spot and then obliterates them all in one swing of a warhammer. Spells, special attacks, and modifier effects can be deployed by drawing preselected rune shapes on your screen, which gives an air of strategy to the basic hack 'n slash mechanics. The ads are easily skipped over if your time is worth too much, and there isn't even a "Store" button where you can pay to win through various god gear. There's no point where content is locked behind a paywall. The game gives you ample opportunities to watch optional ad videos to pick up the extra handful of them, daily logon bonuses and side-quests (things like "kill 50 of this particular enemy NPC") pay even more. And certainly, you can buy gems with real world dollars, but it's hardly necessary. There's the standard two-currency system, with basic transactions coming from gold coins and the more vital things, like unlocking sockets and spell slots, as well as opening certain treasure chests, costs gems. And it's completely gratis, without any popups or banner ads ruining the ambiance. On the surface, Eternium is a stripped down, mobile-friendly re-skinning of a classic dungeon crawler like the original Diablo.

It's just so hard to find a nice, unassuming app that lets me wade through hordes of ghoulies with intuitive controls built specifically for my touchscreen, without a single mention of real money attached.
