Merge Mansion

A lack of instructions, confusing gameplay features, and imprecise controls condemns the hard work you'll put in at this mansion. In Merge Mansion, players move between character conversations that reveal a plot involving family secrets to combining similar items on a game board to convert them into things necessary to perform home renovation work. Merging two garden knives, for instance, creates a garden fork -- which, when paired with another garden fork, will create shears that can be doubled up with another pair of shears to eventually make an ax.

In some instances, the developers' efforts to explain things clearly pay off. For example, you can click on an item on the game board and see the merge-related evolution it needs to go through to reach its final stage. The XP/leveling-up process and some other game aspects, though, are less clear. The replenishment of certain items involves a time countdown, such as eight minutes, while the wait for others isn't as specific. In some instances, timers seem to hover at the end mark indefinitely. Players will also periodically be asked if they want to sell something, and then see a message that says one item was valuable and be asked if they'd like to cancel the sale, but they aren't told which item they might reconsider selling, or how that process works. Gameplay can feel wonky at times. Sometimes, when you're trying to merge an item with something else, the object will just move past what you're trying to connect it with to another square on the board. The app also just contains a hefty number of components. The amount of matchable items, upgrade capabilities, and other elements that are involved may overwhelm young kids -- and the gameplay can start to feel a little tedious after a while. While new items are introduced periodically to match, you're primarily just switching between trying to create the items you need for tasks and watching the work quickly be performed -- and visitors may not want to linger long in Merge Mansion as a result.