When comparing You Must Build a Boat vs Merchant, the Slant community recommends Merchant for most people. In the question“What are the best mindless games on Android that give a sense of progression through earned skills and unlocks?” Merchant is ranked 1st while You Must Build a Boat is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose Merchant is:
The game has a nice retro pixel art style. From the menus to the dungeons or shop there is a very familiar aesthetic to the overall design that would have fit in quite well on consoles in the 80's.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Keeps track of time played
This allows the user to go back to levels and try to beat their time in each, which makes for good replayability.
Pro Smooth, polished gameplay
Eighty Eight Games took what they learned from their previous title 10000000 and refined it even further while adding new mechanics to make a smooth cycle of matching tiles and leveling up that never gets dull or grindy.
Pro Pixel art
The game has a nice retro pixel art style. From the menus to the dungeons or shop there is a very familiar aesthetic to the overall design that would have fit in quite well on consoles in the 80's.
Pro Fun resource management mechanic
The player can sell their loot (gathered from a dungeon) for in game money, to then be spent on needed equipment or can equip their loot to try harder dungeons to get better loot to sell for new equipment. Each action is a gamble and may or may not pay off for the player.
Pro In active development
Merchant is still in a very active development phase, which means there will be plenty of bug fixes and new features and tweaks to the gameplay added.
Pro Dedicated subreddit
Merchant has a dedicated subreddit page where users can discuss the game, strategies and bugs.
Pro Completely free and zero permissions
Merchant is a completely free game that also has zero permissions.
Cons
Con Simple presentation
While a current trend the simplistic graphics and music may turn some people off when looking for a current game. The gameplay itself is fantastic but the 8bit style graphics do look pretty low effort.
Con Current version has both ads and in-app purchases
Con Wait times
There are wait times in the game for both crafting and adventuring. This makes it impossible to sit and play for any length of time and makes the user have to come back to the game often in order to make any significant progress.
Con Lag/delay of action
When pressing buttons in the menus there is a noticeable delay until the requested action actually takes place.