Merge Maestro review

Are you tired of deck-building roguelikes? Merge Maestro doesn't care. It is yet another pretty awesome run-based game where you mix and match powers, tokens, board types, and consumables to try and fight your way through 15 waves of enemies. I have not been able to play much of anything else because of this game, even though it simply puts a merge-based twist on very well-worn territory.

Merge Maestro has you placing tokens on a 4x4 grid in an effort to clear a queue of up to four enemies that can appear at the top of the screen. Tokens can do a variety of different things, but at their most basic (i.e. at the beginning of a run), they deal a point of damage when placed and tokens that share the same number can be merged into a larger number that does the same thing.

As you clear waves of enemies, Merge Maestro gives you three choices to transform one of your tokens into a random new. You might get an offer to turn your two's into ducks, or four's into french horns, for example. Each of these new tokens have new abilities alongside their new appearance. Some may destroy tokens, create consumable items on your grid, buff other tokens on the board, etc. The goal of each run of Merge Maestro is to successfully draft and mold your lineup of tokens so that you can keep killing enemies in short enough order that they don't kill you and end the run.

The way combat works in Merge Maestro is a bit strange, but it creates the opportunity for token abilities to have the wide range of effects they do while all seeming viable. Each "turn" gives you the ability to take four actions, which are generally things like placing new tiles from your queue, merging existing tiles on your grid, or dragging consumables onto played or unplayed tokens, before a new enemies appear to fill the queue. If you take these four actions and the queue of enemies isn't full, you take no damage and proceed with another turn. If it is full, the enemy at the front of the queue hits you, vacates the queue, and an enemy comes in behind them.

The reason I say that this system opens up opportunity is because Merge Maestro has a ton of token variety that operates differently based on different keywords. There are tokens that perform an action as soon as they appear, others with passive effects, ones that cancel existing keywords, and still others that depend on consumables or countdowns for their abilities to activate. Managing space on your grid and engineering a way to juggle a mishmash of tokens and their modes of operation to keep dishing out damage is the only way to find yourself through all of the waves in Merge Maestro, and finding new ways to do this is what keeps each new run compelling.

The variety in Merge Maestro does not start and stop with different tokens doing different things, either. There are irridescent-colored, "upgraded" versions of each token that add to their base effects that you can come across, passive abilities you can draft as you get further into runs, different board types that change certain rules and guarantee certain token types to appear, and even different difficulty levels that switch up enemy types, add modifiers to them, and more.

In playing this game nonstop for almost a week straight, I still haven't seen all of the variety there is in Merge Maestro. Personally, I love the way each run brims with the excitement of the random and unexpected. That said, there are times when Merge Maestro can drag. The early waves almost always play out the same way, and there are times where ambiguous language can make picking up a new power or token spell the death of a run. I haven't let those blemishes stop me from playing the heck out of it, though.

I keep thinking I'm done with these turn-based roguelikes, but Merge Maestro shows there's still fuel in the tank of innovation for this format. Some clever design choices around combat allow for a tremendous amount of variety that is more fun to engage and experiment with than it is a pain to sift through.