Merge Cats - Idle Game

A merge loop as simple as the title suggests

Merge Cats - Idle Game is unambiguous about what it is. Two identical cats, dragged together, combine into the next tier up — a rarer breed with, per the store page, "enhanced features and unique traits." Merged cats generate coins passively, coins buy more starting kittens and shop upgrades, and upgraded cats generate coins faster, closing the loop that defines every merge idler from the last several years of the genre's boom. The store page adds gift boxes as a secondary reward channel and describes habitats to unlock as the collection grows, but doesn't go much further than that in specifics — no roadmap of breeds, no stated end state, no mention of a prestige or reset system that would give the loop a second act once the board fills up. Judged purely against its own pitch, it is a complete, self-contained execution of the merge-idle template: nothing about the description suggests it does the basics badly, and nothing suggests it does them in an especially interesting way either.

The one area it gets unambiguously right

Whatever else is thin about Merge Cats, its commercial structure is not. NZ$3.19 buys the entire game outright — no ads, no premium currency, no timed boosts for sale, nothing gating progression behind a purchase. That puts it in a small, well-regarded category of budget idlers that treat the sticker price as the whole deal rather than the entry fee, the same trait that carried Idle Stellar to a recommendation in this outlet's coverage of the genre despite its own thin late-game. For a genre that built its mobile reputation on exactly the opposite — energy timers, gacha pulls, watch- an-ad-to-double-your-coins prompts — a flat one-time price with nothing else to buy is worth stating plainly as a point in the game's favour, independent of how much content sits behind it.

Almost nobody left to ask

Where Merge Cats runs into trouble is not in what it does, but in how little evidence exists that anyone has recently found out. Steam's own review system currently shows exactly two English- language reviews for the game, both positive, and Steam itself displays that as "too few reviews" to generate a percentage score at all — the same threshold this outlet has flagged before on very young Early Access titles, except Merge Cats has had over four years to clear it. The all-language total confirms the same count: no larger non-English audience is hiding behind the English sample. Neither review runs long. One logged 18 minutes and calls the game "more of a mobile game than anything else," adding, not unkindly, that "it is an idle game so just keep it on and grind it out to finish it" — a phrasing that implies a definite end state, though nothing in the available record says what that end state actually is or how long it takes to reach, since the game ships no Steam achievements to chart a curve against. A GetNumberOfCurrentPlayers check at the time of writing returned zero concurrent players, and the developer's own news feed carries exactly one post in the game's entire history: an April 2025 cross-promotional announcement for an unrelated Indie Heroes bundle sale, not a patch note. Nothing in the public record points to Merge Cats having received a content update, bug fix or balance pass since its April 2022 launch.

A claim worth flagging, not confirming

The other English review is more pointed. Its author, who logged 23 minutes and earned six helpful votes for the post, reports the game pushing an Intel i7-7700 to 50% CPU usage and writes, "possibly a crypto miner inside, be careful!" This review has no way to verify that claim — it was not able to run the game to check, and no second report corroborates it anywhere in the available Steam or web record. Idle games with a background simulation loop can genuinely produce unusual CPU load from nothing more sinister than an unthrottled tick rate, and a single uncorroborated four-year-old anecdote is thin evidence for the more serious reading. It would also be dishonest to leave it out: it's a specific, sourced report from a player who bothered to check their own system monitor, on a game with so little other feedback that this one data point carries more relative weight than it would on a title with thousands of reviews to average against. Anyone trying Merge Cats at NZ$3.19 loses very little by keeping Task Manager open for the first few minutes.

Part of a wider, thinly documented catalogue

Boogygames Studios is a small, two-person team based in the Netherlands with a catalogue built almost entirely of cheap, short, genre-template casual titles — Merge Cats sits alongside the 2019 platformer Squirrel Jump and the 2023 title Gold Rush Clicker, an idle mining clicker that follows the same "tap, upgrade, repeat" shape this review describes for the cat-merging loop here. That pattern — small teams, low prices, a clean genre template with limited post-launch investment — is common enough in the budget end of the merge and idle space that Merge Cats reads less like an isolated misfire and more like a fairly typical example of the type: functional, inoffensive, and built to a price point that doesn't leave much room for ongoing support once it's out the door.

Final verdict

Merge Cats - Idle Game is difficult to fault on its own narrow terms and difficult to recommend on any wider ones. The merge loop is present and complete, the price is fair, and the total absence of ads or in-app purchases is a genuine point in its favour in a genre that too often lacks exactly that discipline. But four years on, the evidence base for actually judging how that loop holds up over time is almost nonexistent: two reviews, zero achievements, zero concurrent players and no patch history beyond a single unrelated bundle promotion. Layer in one uncorroborated but specific CPU-usage report, and the honest verdict is not that Merge Cats is a bad game — it's that almost no one is around to say whether it's a good one. 4.0 reflects a clean, cheap, forgettable idler that never earned the attention needed to prove itself either way.