Kawaii Guns: Merge and Shoot Review

A Cute Idle Clicker

Fight off hoards of aliens with increasingly stronger guns in Topchan Games’ Kawaii Guns: Merge and Shoot. It’s up to you to save the world as a girl from the Kawaii agency. There’s plenty of guns to go around, both familiar ones like the ubiquitous AK-47 and futuristic weapons such as the Alien Blaster. Additionally where guns fail, you have access to a full-screen bomb to clear out the endless masses of aliens that desire nothing more than your demise.

Kawaii Guns: Merge and Shoot centers around your unnamed cute girl and eventually an ally named Tian, who helps by stunning the bigger targets so you have more time to click them to death. As far as plot, there isn’t anything more than what’s already been stated, as soon as you boot up you’re thrown straight into the fray with no embellishments of any kind.

Not only do aliens pose a threat, but between levels you contend with ads that may pose a higher threat than the aforementioned aliens. Aside from that, the main gameplay, offered up via cute anime-inspired graphics, consists of shooting aliens and gaining money from defeating them, which you use to buy more guns, which you then merge with one another.

Exponential Growth

Merging in this game is as simple as dragging and dropping identical weapons onto each other for the next tier weapon. This continues on in a linear fashion. Weapons only increase in strength, and there’s no room for specialization or diversity. As you buy duplicate weapons, their prices increase. You’ll reach numbers in the billions quickly enough. Between levels, your character autonomously shoots aliens safely behind deployed cover, which generates cash at a steady flow.

Kawaii Guns: Merge and Shoot offers a MPS (money per second) count that allows you to idly gather up money for the heftier purchases. Additionally, when you successfully merge a weapon you’re given gems, which can be used to purchase keys for crates which contain goodies, or spend directly on power or critical hit-rate upgrades. The gems you acquire can be doubled by watching advertisements. You’ll need every bit you can get as the prices ascend and successive stages throw stronger aliens.

Idly Shooting

During stages your main action is just tapping an icon to make your girl shoot faster than her default rate. You can either tap it or hold it, but this is restricted by an overheating meter that when emptied, stops you from firing manually. In addition to that, you have the three cooldown abilities. One is a heal, an ability that comes in handy as the difficulty ramps up, another is a screen-wide bomb that clears out numerous enemies, and the final one you can acquire lets you paralyze the biggest enemy on the screen to give you more time to gun it down.

At its core this is very much a “watch the numbers increase” game, there’s not really any difficulty presented aside from grinding up money to do more complex merges. Complicating matters is the addition of random advertisements, however there is an option to turn off random ads via microtransactions, which still leaves watching adverts for bonuses as an option but otherwise allows you to idle properly.

An Unfortunate Lack of Variety

Something you may notice quickly is the lack of variety with the aliens. You’ll be shooting a lot of the same enemies throughout the numerous stages, with the only change being their palette and health. The primary hurdle in stage progression is having the strongest weapon possible, which gets more and more difficult as the prices spike into the millions and above. As this is a game that will have you buying in bulk, the exponential increase in prices severely limits your progression as you spend time waiting to have enough money to afford duplicates and merge them to higher tiers.

Even with the game adding “checkpoints” in the weapon progression, it still can be an arduous task to try to have the most up to date gear in time for the next stage boss. Additionally, your reward for clearing a set of levels is a new backdrop and stronger aliens to shoot. After a while the dynamic begins to feel more like work than fun. What’s more, there’s not much in the way of story or even dialog, with the only instance being when you first encounter Tian. For players who desire story-driven gameplay it comes as a disappointment, as all the grinding just leads to tougher aliens and more waiting. Rinse. Repeat.