Merek’s Market

Merek’s Market was reviewed on a PS4

Merek’s Market lets you play as the most important person in every medieval RPG game. No, not the dual swords-wielding guy with the silver hair and bossy witch girlfriend. You play as the proud shop owner who supplies the monster-hunting dude with all of the supplies he needs. Okay, I’ll stop with the Witcher references now. Merek’s Market is actually a lot of fun, that’s suitable for the whole family.

What is Merek’s Market?

Merek’s Market is a management sim in which you play as a simple guy called Merek, who decides to open up shop. You’ll get to manage your own medieval crafting shop. Create and sell a wide variety of items; belts, chairs, swords, shields and gloves among many others. Haggle with your customers like a real shopkeeper, as you’ll scurry around trying to manage all of the orders at once. Your job is simple, follow a certain recipe, and create the various items that your customers request.

A fast paced and entertaining game that isn’t particularly memorable, but is indeed a ton of fun. Each item has a certain recipe that you have to follow. For example, to build a chair you need to combine cowhide with wood. As you progress in the game, these recipes get more complicated and start to require several steps to craft the items.

There’s also a few boss missions to tackle throughout the 50 missions of its single player campaign. During these missions, you’ll have to create a special order that requires several components and items to be crafted, and it features a minigame when trying to assemble the final item. These boss missions are hectic, challenging and entertaining.

Once you’re done serving a customer, he’ll head to a second table so he can pay you. Being paid is the tricky part of the game, as you’ll have to do a few button combinations without messing up so you can get a higher multiplier. While it doesn’t make much sense, this gameplay element is a great addition as it adds an extra challenge.

Going Once, Going Twice, Sold

There’s also missions where you have to haggle with customers and listen closely to what they say so you can determine whether to overcharge them or not. Overcharging a customer will cause them to make a lower counter offer. These exchanges are the source of most of the game’s humor.  However, the jokes often struggle to land. A lady that wants to impress a guy by pretending to know how to axe throw, or a family of jesters where the sister buys an axe so her brother buys armor to defend himself from her. These haggling sequences are also fully voice acted, which was a nice surprise.

Cartoonish and Charming

The graphics are cartoonish yet they’re not very detailed, and they can even be a bit bland and repetitive to look at after a while. While the game’s presentation is charming, it’s not very impressive. After spending multiple levels in the same boring shop, it can be a bit of an eye sore. Merek does change up his store during certain parts of the game, but there’s no option to customize it at all, which brings me to one of the game’s main issues.

Other than getting a high score on the leaderboards, the game doesn’t motivate you to get a gold star rating in each of the game’s 50 levels. There’s no way to spend those hard-earned coins, and there isn’t any extras or collectables to unlock. Aside from the leaderboards, there’s literally no reason to try to get a higher score.

It also features a coop story mode of 40 missions that’s almost identical to the single player one, minus the haggling and the voice acting. Merek’s Market’s only drawbacks are its lack of replayability due to its lack of extra bonuses or collectibles.

Overall,

Merek’s Market is an enjoyable game through and through. Managing your customers, remembering all of the game’s recipes and haggling with your clients is a lot of fun. While it won’t leave quite a lasting impression on you, it will in fact entertain you for the entirety of its lengthy campaign.

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Special thanks go to Renaissance PR for providing us with a review code.

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You should play Merek’s Market if you

• Enjoy games like Overcooked
• Don’t mind the lack of replayability
• Would love a local coop campaign
• Don’t mind the lack of visual variety
• Love crafting and following recipes

Merek’s Market Score

7.5/10