Transmute Monsters In Merlo The Magician
Merlo the Magician: Isle of the Little Monsters ($0.99) by Kooapps is an adorably animated game based on a little boy who dreams of becoming a famous magician. He embarks on a journey across an enchanted island, and learns magic that enables him to transform the monsters he encounters into benign objects.
Controlling Merlo is easy, because he walks forward on his own. Your part in his journey is to help him use his wand to make transformations, drawing the correct symbol with your finger or making the correct gesture on a monster to make the spell cast. If you’ve played the Harry Potter: Spells game, then the movements and gestures will be familiar to you.
If you’re not quick enough drawing symbols, a monster may run into Merlo. When he’s hit by a monster, Merlo will lose a life, and keeping him alive can sometimes be challenging because monsters will swarm towards him. Transmuted monsters turn into objects, which you can tap to add points to your score.
Merlo has three scrolls to use that will assist him during the course of the game. A yellow scroll causes all the monsters on the screen to slow down and a red scroll bestows an extra life. Over the course of the game, you will discover other scrolls as well.
There are several stages to progress through, and each one gets harder. I found that the stages lasted entirely too long, and veered towards being slightly boring. There is not a lot of variation in gameplay, making this game tedious to play for long periods of time. However, when playing in short spurts, it’s perfectly fine.
Merlo the Magician is an interesting game that’s not quite like anything else available in the App Store, but I did experience some frustration with the controls. Even when drawing the correct symbol over a monster (a check mark) oftentimes it did not register and the monster continued to approach Merlo. I also found that I had to draw symbols in exactly the right spot - being off a slight amount caused spells to fail.
If you are a patient person, and don’t mind drawing the same thing over and over again, Merlo the Magician is a unique game that can be a lot of fun to play.
However, I don’t recommend it at this point because it is in desperate need of some UI and gameplay enhancements. If you want to check it out and see for yourself, there’s a lite version available for download.
