Yet Another Merger
Mergeland – Animal Adventure Island, or just Mergeland according to the title screen, is a merging puzzle game. The premise is quite simple: merge stuff to unlock more stuff and save the land. Granted, the actual puzzle element is quite light. Knowing how many copies of a thing to merge and when isn’t that hard. Like most merge games, Mergeland really isn’t that deep. Whether or not the lack of depth is a good thing is up to the player.
The developer of Mergeland goes by the name of SuperFun Games Studio, with Mergeland being their sole game. Unfortunately, finding information on them is difficult. In fact, the developer website link on the Play Store doesn’t even lead to anything related to them. The link just goes to the website for Mobile Tube Ltd, the company behind Face App. Furthermore, there is another game that uses the name “Mergeland” from another developer—with game being Mergeland: Dragons. It almost makes this game seem shady.
Definition of Generic
Mergeland doesn’t stand out aesthetically. The art style is a run-of-the-mill derivative of Clash of Clans. None of the character designs are particularly exemplary nor are they worth mentioning in detail. Probably the most notable thing about the aesthetics is just how off-putting they are. The colors give the various characters a sort of plastic look that makes them seem uncanny. Their porcelain doll-like eyes and marionette-like animations don’t help things either.
The gameplay of Mergeland isn’t that special. One just has to merge three adjacent copies of the same object to make new ones. The only real form of strategy is merging five copies of something to acquire two products instead of using six. Mergeland also features crafting with foodstuff because of course there must be crafting. Players then use the food dishes to acquire keys needed to unlock new areas. Plus, there are special item merging trees used to rescue the residents, which one must do to progress.
More like Wait-land
Mergeland, like many free-to-play games, likes to make players wait. It has all the familiar trappings: timers, stamina, multiple currencies and even ads. The game gives a limited number of workers to mine merging materials, which just adds to the waiting. Some of the objects need to undergo construction to even become usable. All these things encourage players to spend money or watch ads just to speed up the process. At least the game features a scratch-off minigame to acquire more stamina, but that’s where the novelty ends.
The best thing one can say about Mergeland is that it works as intended. There doesn’t seem to be any major bugs or performance issues outside of the occasional error with the ad rewards. However, the English translation is something to be desired. Its script feels like something from Google Translate at times, which can be its own form of entertainment. There are much better places to find funny bad translations, though. Unless one really likes merge games, it’s best to just give this one a pass.
Is It Hardcore?
Meh, it’s not even that interesting.
Mergeland – Animal Adventure Island is the very definition of generic. It fails to stand out among the multitude of merging games. It’s not even that visually appealing with its cheap off-brand art style. At least it runs fine. One is better off playing any other merge game.
