Merge & Blade – Game Pass Review

Candy Crush meets Total War

In the midst of games such as Valheim, Wo Long & Civilization VI being added on to Game Pass in the past few weeks often smaller indie games can drop off your radar.

Merge & Blade is very much a game that I knew nothing about prior to downloading it. The “Merge” genre of games is something I would normally associate with Pay 2 Win Mobile games. But this plucky little game has completely absorbed me with it’s simple yet highly addictive game play loop.

Divide & Conquer

Magic Cube Games aren’t a studio that I had heard of prior to playing this game, so I wouldn’t be able to tell you if this is the niche of their back catalogue of games. But if this is the first auto-battling merge game they have ever made. They have nailed the concept perfectly.

The gameplay of Merge & Blade is a simple premise, and much like Vampire Survivors (my personal 2022 GOTY), relies on a only a few button presses. You merge your men, and the auto battler system does the rest of the work for you. At the start of each level you are presented with a blank canvas. A 5 x 5 grid that you use to deploy your soldiers, and the key focus is stacking your characters. When you combine 3 farmers, you receive 1 blacksmith. 3 blacksmiths will produce 1 soldier. 3 soldiers creates an archer etc.

This is where the real skill lies, working out how to set your battlefield ready for the oncoming wave of enemies.

Are you going to merge your Archers in to a priest who can heal, but who cannot deal any damaged?

Do you put your farmers at the front to act as cannon fodder?

Will you make a line of pikemen or merge them to make a much stronger barbarian?

Upgrade your arsenal

Everything you do in Merge & Blade has a knock on effect. Merging your men, defeating an enemy & finishing a level will earn you coins. In turn these coins will then allow you to earn upgrades to your soldiers, give you more turns or unlock new characters.

As your progress through the game the difficulty ramp up is really manageable and never feels unfair. You will always be upgrading your characters at the same rate of change of the NPC’s. However there is always going to be some form of RNG to keep things interesting. With options to view the upcoming enemies & preview your next turn it brings in a real level of planning and tactics that I wasn’t expecting from a game as simple as Merge & Blade.

Hidden depths

Merge & Blade also has a host of other modes to keep you coming back for more.

• Versus Mode: An against the clock couch co-op mode where you try to create the best squad of soldiers in a best of 3 competition.
• The Challenge: as the name suggests, pits players against an array of different challenges.
• Defence mode: Set up your squad to take on successive waves of mobs.
• Roguelike: It wouldn’t be an Xbox Game Pass indie game if it wasn’t also a Rogue Like!

This is a game with so much to offer, in such a small package.

So far, having beaten the campaign I have put close to 10 hours in to the game. But it keeps me coming back for more & is a perfect pick up and play game for when you just need to switch off for an hour.

On the verge of greatness

There is so much about Merge & Blade that I adore. I love the soundtrack to this game, there is something about voxel graphics & chiptune music that always hits the nostalgia receptors in my brain in the right way,

The visuals in the game are great too, pixel art games are nothing new, but when they are done well they always look spectacular.

Of course the gameplay is brilliant, however as with all auto-battler games it can have it’s issues. The element of RNG (random number generation) involved can sometimes frustrate as I would find myself inundated later in the game with weaker soldiers who did little to no damage to enemies. This wasn’t an issue in the early game, but having late game mobs take out 5/6 enemies in 1 attack could, and would, end an entire run early.

Thankfully each level is only roughly 5/10 minutes so it wasn’t something overly troublesome.

However, my biggest grip is something not actually in the game. This game is available to play via xCloud. But it doesn’t have built in touch controls. Merge & Blade is almost the perfect game to be played with touch controls, and I really hope they are implemented sooner rather than later.

But, this is a small game by a relatively unknown team, so I cannot be overly critical of the lack of scope with something like Touch Controls being omitted.

However, this really is a game that will sink it’s claws in and will have you coming back for “just one more round”

Merge & Blade is available on PC, Xbox Game Pass, Xbox One/Series & Xbox Cloud Gaming right now.