SPOILERS ARE NOW OPEN

Not that there is much to spoil.

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our 12th game of 2023 is Merge & Blade. The target completion date is June 19, 2023.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after June 5, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You are also free to come back any time after the completion date and share your thoughts! This club is meant to be open to all whenever you want to join in the fun!

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Merge & Blade?

A drop well puzzler where you combine troops to make them stronger and then battle them against monsters!

How long is Merge & Blade?

How long to beat lists it as 7.5 hours long, but there are roguelike and challenge modes.

Some notes:

I put this in general discussion because as far as I can tell there is no wiki page for Merge & Blade. If this is wrong please point me to the page (I submitted one myself but do not have enough wiki points for unmoderated submissions.)

This may also be the final game of the UUGPGC if people have fully lost interest. We got 0 votes this cycle so I just picked from the list, and we got one comment on Mortal Shell. As much as I like talking to myself I can do that without posting. No pressure or guilt intended, just letting people know.

Welp, seems like the club has really fallen off. I'm sure part of it has to do with no major eligible games being added to Gamepass in a minute, but also TotK, Jedi: Fallen Order & Diablo 4 are probably still taking up all of my time until FF16 comes out at the end of the month.. so yeah, I just haven't been able to participate as much as I had hoped.

I'll give Merge & Blade a chance to palate cleanse from everything else I am playing though!

So obviously there is not a lot of plot to talk about with this game but overall I quite liked it. I actually finished it before the Game Club selected it but I found the puzzle gameplay pretty fun and while the auto battle sections were simple there was at least some strategy. It was satisfying to line up troops in the right order that your beefy boys were up front with ranged units and healers behind them. I do wish that there was a litlte more of a trade off between troop types (like ranged units having less HP even if they were higher on the "chain" or things like that) but this is not a very well balanced game anyway. It's not top tier but at least it's original and entertaining. The type of game that used to come out on the DS or other handhelds as a little more experimental and a little less polished but still pretty fun. It seems like the focus now is on the roguelite mode with new DLC dropping and I've played a little of that but I'm not sure I want to spend money on it.

I only spent about 30 minutes playing this yesterday, but I kinda like the hook. It's like a less stressful You Must Build a Boat or 10000000. It took me a second to realize that it wasn't a game over if you fill up your grid with troops, and once I realized that, I enjoyed it way more. It was always great to be able to fulfill a strategy, while also not being that difficult that if you just have a lot of guys, with a decent balance of healers, you can kinda brute force it (at least as early as I am). My only real downside to it is that I didn't feel like it was worth playing on a TV. I'm not gonna knock the game for that though, and ended up installing it on my PC instead to play later. Overall, I kinda just wish I was playing this on mobile or handheld though since it's really easy to just pop in for one level. I'll definitely keep playing it in short spurts on PC though.