Backpack Merge

 

Backpack Merge is a fun lightweight clicker that I installed last weekend.  You are a little Harry Potter dude and the object of the game is to merge items in your limited backpack space, expand that backpack space, merge more items, then auto-battle wave after wave of unnamed creatures at the top of the screen.  I got through the first few levels and found it amusing, though 20 waves of creatures is too much.  

The buttons at the bottom are: Offers, Hero & Clothing, Adventure, Equipment, Challenges and (about two weeks ago) Guild.

After a long run of successes, it suddenly got harder without warning and my backpack full of goodies no longer beat the baddies.  It turns out that you have to go to the Equipment page and keep updating your items (click the item and then the tiny Info button, then Upgrade if you have the tokens to do so), so the power creep seems well balanced.  There are additional items and more slots that open as you level up.  You can swap items in and out of those slots to try them all.  I currently have 3 tabs of item slots as shown below, so you can have a different tab of items for each character to fling around.

I found that while upgrading the spaces in your pack, you can move the whole block of current spaces in any direction to make room for more.  That was unexpected.  I had a L-shaped block of new squares and no place to put them, and accidentally moved the whole cluster of spaces.  Boom, that's a feature.  You do have to add spaces one at a time and hit the green Accept button after each one.

You can upgrade the items on the Equipment page, and when you get an item up to level 9, then tier 5 unlocks in the main backpack screen, after which you can merge the gold items and choose a higher-powered item from one of two choices each time.  

On the Hero & Clothing page you can level up your hero, gather puzzle pieces to unlock three other characters, and level up and merge the stuff you're wearing.

The Daily Challenge has 10 waves per attempt, while the main Encounter tab has 20 waves per attempt.  I am at the point where I feel overpowered for the Daily Challenges, but the main Encounters are still not a guaranteed win -- for me they just take too long.

At the most basic level, it's a type of Tower Defense game: you power up and then hope you can take on all the opponents coming your way.  I don't like Tower Defense games, since I would rather explore and build things without worrying if they are going to be destroyed.  But this one is cute.

After a few more sessions, here's a more advanced version of my Harry Potter dude with a pack full of pointy stuff.    There are also potions which include Poison.  And crystal balls that I still don't know what good they are.  I would later see that there are scarves for protection.  The gauntlet gives you a shield bar on the left of your main health bar, and the wizard hat regenerates that health on the right, and you want them to work together faster than the bad guys deplete it.

There are a lot of different screens to explore.  It has pretty much every standard screen from every game these days.  Daily Challenges, Quests, Guilds, blah blah.  Just look for anything with a tiny red dot at the top right.  There are tons of bonuses hidden deep in those screens.  

 

One thing I did NOT like was the screen where you run around some outdoor area and avoid getting mobbed.  The on-screen controls didn't really work for me, and I would lose just because I had to move my finger to start dragging a different direction.  I don't care for that kind of scramble challenge anywhere, so no harm no foul, I just won't go there.

 

The best bonus I could find was buying 100 loot tickets for $0.99.  You can then use those anywhere there's a button requiring a video.  One ticket skips one video, and you can level up much faster than before.  When that ran out, I never did see that offer again, but I got the ad-free permanent option for about $9.   I always feel it's worth supporting the apps that I decide to keep.

The app is very actively being updated.  Every few days I see an announcement about more levels and additions.  I think the last message announced that level 230 was ready.  I'm at level 22, and only really have a few minutes at the end of the day to tinker with it.

 

This is a fun one.  The art is friendly and memorable with nothing violent.  Somehow they took a game mechanic which is a huge nuisance in many games -- getting odd-shaped items to fit in your backpack -- and crafting a game out of it, so kudos for somehow making it likeable.  Anne likes to watch me before bed and really got into merging items.  The battles themselves are actually not really important.

 

I looked for a Bestiary page telling me what all the little foes were, but I could not find one.  Or any kind of story. It gets by without these things, though I'm tempted to write my own backstory blurbs for wach weird monster and send it to them for fun.