Merge Beasts - Defense Game

There is one number in this review that does more work than the other two thousand words combined: zero. That's the count of Steam user reviews Merge Beasts - Defense Game has collected since it launched on 1 June 2022. Not a low score, not a mixed one — no reviews at all, positive or negative, in over four years of continuous availability at a price under two US dollars. On a storefront where even bad games usually accumulate a handful of angry write-ups, that silence is itself a finding worth explaining.

The pitch

The idea is a straightforward graft of two familiar systems. Beasts spawn on a grid; drag two identical ones together and they merge into a single stronger beast. Place your merged beasts along the approach to your temple and they fight automatically as waves of "evil Beasts" advance. Clear enough waves and defeat the level's boss to unlock the next one, working through a handful of themed settings — forests, deserts, icy mountains — that the store page frames as an "epic journey" rather than distinct game modes.

It's a clean enough concept on paper. Merge mechanics reward you for consolidating a cluttered board into fewer, stronger pieces; tower defence rewards you for positioning what you've got against an approaching threat. Put together, the theoretical hook is that merging isn't just board management, it's your only means of getting stronger before the next wave arrives, so every combine decision doubles as a defensive one. The store listing promises "endless gameplay" and "boss waves" on top of that base loop, plus beast abilities — area attacks, summons, shields — layered on once creatures are strong enough to trigger them.

Where this idea has already lived

None of that description is unique to this game, and that's the central problem. "Merge creatures, defend a base from waves" is one of the more heavily worked sub-genres on mobile app stores, populated by games with names built from the same two words in different orders — merge kingdoms, merge dragons, merge tower defense, merge monsters — most of them free to download and monetised instead through gacha-style unlocks and ad-watching. Merge Beasts arrives on Steam as a paid, ad-free alternative to that crowd, which is a legitimate pitch on price and cleanliness alone. But it doesn't bring anything to the underlying loop that those free versions haven't already established, and several of them are still being actively updated while this one has sat unchanged.

It's also not an outlier within its own publisher's catalogue. Boogygames Studios is a small Netherlands-based team that has shipped a run of similarly-scoped budget titles — Merge Cats, an idle cat-collecting merge game; Idle Business Tycoon; Gold Rush Clicker — each built around one compact, easily-explained loop dressed in a different theme. That's not automatically a criticism; plenty of small studios work a template they know how to finish and ship. But it does mean Merge Beasts should be judged as one entry in a template rather than a game built specifically to justify itself, and the lack of any distinguishing mechanic here supports that reading.

The DLC split

The base game is NZ$3.19. On top of that sit two separate purchasable add-ons, "Expansion Pack 1" and "Expansion Pack 2," each NZ$1.59 — bringing a fully-owned copy to roughly NZ$6.37. Steam's own listing doesn't specify what content sits behind each pack, and with no reviews to check that against, there's no way to confirm from outside whether they add meaningful new levels or a relatively small amount of extra content. What's clear structurally is that a casual game already priced as an impulse buy has its full offering split into three separate purchases rather than shipped as one package — a pattern worth knowing about before buying, even though the total outlay stays low in absolute terms.

On the credit side of the same ledger: nothing in the base game's Steam categories points to in-app purchases, a premium currency, or ads. Whatever else is true about the pack split, this isn't a live-service merge game trying to monetise you continuously after the sale — the store takes its money in one to three transactions and stops asking.

What the absence of data actually tells you

No user reviews also means no achievement list, no discussion board activity to speak of, and nothing resembling a Steamcharts footprint. There's no failure mode visible here in the way a review corpus usually exposes one — no reports of crashes, no balance complaints, no "the merge detection is finicky" thread to point to, because there's no thread. That cuts both ways: it means this review can't tell you the game is broken, because nobody has documented that it is. It also means nobody has documented that it isn't, and a merge-and-defend game with no players talking about which beast combinations work has effectively no community layer at all — a genre that usually thrives on players comparing builds and sharing tier lists, sitting here with none of that ever having formed.

Read plainly, four years of total silence on a marketplace of Merge Beasts' size says the game found essentially no audience on Steam, positive or negative. That's a market-reception fact rather than a design verdict on its own, but it's hard to separate from a design that doesn't distinguish itself from a very crowded field of free alternatives.

Verdict

Merge Beasts - Defense Game does what it says on the tin — drag, merge, place, defend — and asks very little of your time or wallet to find out whether that's for you. The minimum spec is practically decorative by 2026 standards, there's no aggressive monetisation inside the base purchase, and the core action needs no explanation beyond its own name. But the loop is a close match for a sub-genre that's already saturated on mobile, mostly for free, the full package is split across three separate purchases, and in more than four years on Steam it has never generated a single review from a single buyer. That last fact is the most honest review the game has received so far, and it's the one this score is built around.

Four point three out of ten: functional, cheap and unremarkable, in a corner of the merge genre that Steam's players have quietly decided not to weigh in on. Readers who want the "combine and get stronger" feeling with an actual audience behind it, active updates and a real difficulty curve are better served looking at Wanderer's own gathering and crafting loops, or at one of the more established names in mobile merge-defense before spending here.