It’s time to look at an Apple Arcade title that is definitely a very long one. I poured in tons of hours to complete this game and unfortunately the length is actually a weak point here. I tend to enjoy matching gameplay but there should be something with it as opposed to matching just for the sake of it. The game has a story yes, but it is really dragged out with whole chapters going by without much plot progression. The grind was a little too much for a little amount of content which is what doomed this title.

Basically the game starts with a villain deciding to take down Equestria and she has some kind of magical abilities that allow her to summon vines which start to terrorize the populace. Nobody knows that she is doing this but in a way that might have been an issue for her because nobody takes the threat too seriously. Yeah the ponies are removing the vines but there isn’t a lot of urgency. Has she underestimated the resilience of the heroes?

Well she absolutely has, that’s a big guarantee here. The heroes keep on chopping down the vines and rescuing their friends. Rinse and repeat for all 11 chapters, the heroes just don’t stop. You get little cutscenes every now and again and then one main one at the beginning/ending of a chapter but there isn’t any real voice acting. Each character has one word that they will say as a sound effect and they will keep on saying it but that’s like the bare minimum of voice acting. An Apple Arcade title could absolutely afford to have real voice acting.

The graphics are really good though, I can give the game that much at least. The character models are on point and the backgrounds all look sharp. This does at least look like a very modern title. The soundtrack is very limited and while the main theme isn’t bad, there’s nothing very exciting here. You will very quickly forget all about the tunes. This game is aimed a bit younger so I’m not expecting heavy metal or anything but there are plenty of great Mario and Sonic tunes in each game and those are aimed at kids too.

As mentioned, the gameplay itself isn’t bad. Basically you match different items together in order to form new items. Form those new ones to get newer ones, etc. There are 6 kinds of objects and each one has up to 10 levels of items which means a lot of merging. You don’t have unlimited energy either. When you run out of spins you can either wait around 2 hours to replenish 100 merges or you can play a minigame to get up to 75 merges back. It’s nice that there is a way you can just wait it out, but it’s not very practical given the amount of merges that you need. You could go through well over 1000-2000 merges in a single chapter so that’s a lot of merges.

The game also forces you to switch sides every now and again. For example you might just figure you’ll do a ton of minigames to stockpile a few thousand spins and then go do the merging right? Well the cap is 200 so you have to go back and do some merging before you go to the minigames. So you’re constantly switching between the two areas. I don’t think there is really much of a point to making you limited like this. I’d have preferred to focus on one and then the other. There are a lot of minigames but the fastest one in my opinion is feeding the critters. I would just spam that one over and over again.

The game does have a ton of content though, I can tell you that much. The main story probably took me at least 50+ hours to complete and then there are two other story modes to contend with as well. Every 3 days there are mini events you can compete in for fun and of course there is a sticker book which holds your achievements. If you want to 100% that, you will need to play every minigame at least 50+ times and ace all of the story modes. It’s actually very achievable but of course very long.

As far as I know the main story mode is easily the longest out of all the stories but even then I bet this will take a good amount of time for you to beat the others. This is just an example of what I would call a fairly pointless grind. If you really enjoy the game then of course you will be glad for some extra content but if not then there is no incentive to go through the other stories. You will barely be able to muster up the courage to beat the first story mode.

It’s just a shame because a ton of effort was put into this one but the effort was focused on the wrong area. It should have been on making the story mode as compelling as possible and always having some kind of a reward for the merges. When you get enough hearts to unlock the next item, there should always be a cutscene. Maybe make less items but each one costs more merges to unlock and then you would have a better balance here. It’s just rough to play for an hour or more gathering hearts and no real progression to speak of.

Overall, Mane Merge is a game with a ton of content but it was just bloated without a lot of incentive to make it fun. It’s certainly not worth getting Apple Arcade for and I wouldn’t keep the service for this game either. At the end of the day you should give it a go if you’re a huge MLP fan but personally I would say to play one of the matching games like Fruits Mania or Lollipop instead of this title. Those didn’t even have a story and yet they were a lot more fun to go through. This one lacks that addicting edge to it so instead of being lost in the game, you’re wondering when it will end.

Overall 4/10