Browser-based games had been a big part of my life. Sites like Kongregate and CrazyGames provide a steady stream of new games for me to try out and sometimes scratch the itch for the nostalgic experience when life was still simple. Today, I went to CrazyGames to find a game to kill some time and stumbled upon Merge Age Warriors. tactical puzzle game where you summon random unit and merge them to be more powerful so you can take on increasingly unfair group of enemy. It is developed by Roshka Studio and just released in August 2025, so I thought I’d give it a try. If you want to try out the game yourself, you can find it here:
https://www.crazygames.com/game/merge-age-warriors
The Premise
The first thing that I notice is the game looks clean and simple. The tutorial is a bit lacking, but since the game combines pretty common mechanics, you can grasp the concept quickly. So in this game, you summon random units with a click of a button, and you will get a random tier 1 unit. You do that multiple times, and then you will get duplicate units that you can merge together into a higher-tier unit. The interesting part is every unit spawns with a different buff direction, as I would call it. This small triangle points to a direction and provides a buff to the unit it’s pointing to. So in theory you can buff a unit to become a very powerful carry for your team. Note that the direction is randomized, so sometimes you can get awkward buff directions, like a front liner that buffs the unit in front of them. The game only has three types of units as far as I know: the ranged damage dealer, the front-line tank, and the healer.
Once you are happy with your team, or you run out of meat (the currency of the game), then you can click on battle and see your team clash against a group of NPCs. The fight is straightforward; the AI is sometimes weird (like the healer keeps running to the front of the line), but a battle usually lasts less than 30 seconds. Once the battle is over, any remaining surviving unit will return to the grid. Any damaged unit can be healed by upgrading it with a unit of the same tier. Note that when you are dragging a unit to use as an upgrade to a target unit, the direction buff of the upgraded unit will be the same as the target unit, not the source. Knowing this, you can plan accordingly so your team members are buffing the correct unit.
You repeat this process and try to get as far as you can through the wave/level, and as I said before, it gets increasingly unfair. At first I thought I played it the wrong way, but it turns out you are expected to lose because the game has some kind of prestige system. Every time you lose a run, you will get coins and XP, two meta-progression currencies that you can use to power up for the next run.
Once you lose all your units, you will be thrown back to the main menu, where you can upgrade your unit or buy an evolution upgrade. Upgrading a unit requires coins, while upgrading evolution requires XP. As you go up the evolution upgrade tree, eventually you can progress to the next age, and I’m assuming your unit will be upgraded automatically.
And that’s all to it. You repeat the process and try to defeat all the waves/levels. When you fail, you grind your way to the next upgrade.
The Suggestions
Considering this is a mini game that you usually play to kill time, you cannot expect much from it. However, I see that with a little tweak this game could be enhanced to give more hours for the player to enjoy without changing too much of the game.
First, I must say, I like the random buff direction mechanic, as it gives players the hope or fantasy to build the dream team. However, as of now, the buff doesn’t feel significant yet; perhaps I’m just too early into the game. But if this buff is “buffed,” then placement and upgrade will feel more meaningful, and meaningful choice equals fun.
Keeping three units in line is fine due to the nature of the merging mechanic, and added with the random buff direction, three should be sufficient. The evolution system, however, needed some tweaks. Right now, the game feels very grindy because you spend more time repeating the same pattern, and then you get enough XP to evolve, yay! You open the evolution page, and there is only one choice to go. I think if the evolution system is changed into a branching tree where players can make meaningful decisions, it will make the game much more interesting and add lots of playtime. It’s okay to let players grind, but they have to do it on their own motivation. Right now, there is no play style or strategy; you just grind to the next upgrade and find the fastest way to do that. But if, let’s say, evolution has different tech trees to upgrade, then players will strategize to make their own “build” to win the game. In fact, the whole unit upgrade system could be removed and combined into the evolution tree as a branching option, I think.
If those changes are done, then Roshka Studio only needs to think about adding the evolution tech tree with unique bonuses that makes every playthrough different, and players will voluntarily grind just to see how broken things could get. In games like this, I think the most important part is to make the player feel good when they can come up with a powerful combo as they upgrade their army. In that case, then making the enemy scale up drastically in difficulty is acceptable because every time the player visits the evolution upgrade, they want to get back into the grind to see how effective or cool the upgrade is.
Merge Age Warriors is a good game with the potential to be a memorable game where players can sink hours into it. A slight change to the prestige system would go a long way, and I think at this state, the game is still worth trying out. Check out the game and let me know what you think about it.