Funkels: Roguelike Deckbuilder

One Merge Changes Everything

The moment you open Funkels: Roguelike Deckbuilder, the game throws you into a card collection loop. You start with a few basic anime-style characters. The interface is crowded. Buttons for campaign, dungeon, and ranking battles sit alongside a prominent gacha summon icon. The tutorial is brief. It shows you how to drag one card onto another. That action merges them. A higher-level card appears. The power number goes up. That is the entire core mechanic. Merge duplicates to make stronger cards. Repeat.

This loop drives everything. You collect cards from battles or the gacha. You merge them to increase their level and star rank. A three-star card is noticeably stronger than a one-star. The game presents this as progression. But the real friction starts when you realize the gacha drop rates are low. Getting a duplicate of a high-rarity card to merge is rare. Players have reported that without watching ads, progress slows to a crawl. The game pushes you toward its monetization.

What makes this particular merge system different from a standard RPG is how it ties into the battle modes. The campaign is a series of fights against AI opponents. Each win gives you coins and sometimes a card. The dungeon mode increases the difficulty. Ranking battles pit you against other players' teams. Your team's power is a direct result of how many merges you have performed. A player who has merged five copies of a card will have a significantly stronger unit than someone with only one.

Gacha, Merge, Repeat — The Core Loop Under Pressure

Funkels: Roguelike Deckbuilder sits in a crowded space. It competes with games like Marvel Snap and other collection RPGs. Where those games often focus on deck-building strategy, this one leans heavily into the merge mechanic. You are not constructing a deck from a pool of cards. You are merging duplicates to evolve a single card's power. This is similar to games like Merge Dragons, but applied to a TCG framework. The comparison is useful. In Merge Dragons, you merge items to create better ones. Here, you merge cards to create a stronger combat unit. The strategy is not in which cards you play, but in which cards you choose to merge and when.

The gacha system adds a layer of chance. You spend in-game currency to summon a random card. This could be a common card you already have, or a rare one that starts a new merge chain. The problem, as noted in user reviews, is that the drop rate for high-rarity cards is low. One player summarized it as "low drop rate" and "unplayable without ads". Another reviewer mentioned that the VIP pricing is absurd, with one item costing 179 pounds. This creates a pay-to-win dynamic. Players who spend money can summon more, merge more, and build stronger teams faster. Free-to-play players are left grinding or watching ads.

The official changelog for the latest version simply states "Added new features - Improved performance - Fixed bugs". No specific details are given. This is a common pattern. The developer, Gung Park, a Vietnam-based company according to SensorTower, has not published detailed patch notes. This lack of transparency is a frustration for players who want to know what actually changed. Did they adjust the drop rates? Did they fix the card screen freeze? The changelog does not say.

The Device Tethered Progress

One of the most critical issues with the game is the lack of an account binding feature. A user review on the Play Store describes a devastating scenario: "卸載遊戲，再下載回來，資料全不見。我6ur 3星滿全沒了。" This translates to losing all progress after a reinstall. A six-star, fully upgraded card, gone. The review also states that the permanent ad-free purchase does not work. The user calls the developer "人才", which is a sarcastic insult meaning "talented" in a negative way. This is a severe user experience failure. In 2026, a game that does not offer cloud saves or account linking is an outlier. It means that any progress you make is tied to the device's local storage. If you clear the app data, or if your phone breaks, everything is lost.

This technical limitation directly impacts the merge system. Merging is a long-term investment. You collect cards over weeks or months. You merge them to build a powerful team. Without a backup, that investment is fragile. The game does not use Google Play Games Services for save data. It does not offer a Facebook or email login. This is a deliberate choice, or perhaps a lack of development resources. Either way, it is a major risk for any player who intends to spend time or money on the game. The ad-free purchase being broken adds insult to injury. Paying money to remove ads and then still seeing ads is a betrayal of trust.

The Actual Price of a Merge

When you merge two cards, the game consumes one of them. The result is a single, more powerful card. This is a core game mechanic. But the cost of that merge is not just the cards. It is the time spent acquiring them. It is the currency spent on gacha summons to get duplicates. And for paying players, it is the real money spent on in-app purchases. SensorTower data shows in-app purchases range from $1.48 to $279.98 per item. This is a wide range. It suggests that the game has both cheap consumables and very expensive premium packs. The user complaint about a 179-pound VIP item falls into the latter category.

This pricing strategy creates a clear divide. Players who can afford the expensive packs will have a significant advantage. They can summon more, merge more, and dominate the ranking battles. The game does not hide this. The ranking battles are a direct competition between players. A player with a fully merged, high-star team will beat a player with a basic team every time. This is not a game of skill. It is a game of investment. The merge mechanic amplifies this because it is a power multiplier. Merging is not just about getting a new card; it is about exponentially increasing the power of an existing one. One merge can double a card's stats. Ten merges can make it unbeatable.