Ahead of the Game - Idle Shelter pits your plants against zombies - but in a different way

• Simply tap to generate stuff you can combine
• Merge said stuff to form bigger stuff
• Eventually, you'll create farmers to fight against the undead

It's all about merging plants to make…farmers in this week's Ahead of the Game series, where we tell you all about a new mobile endeavour that's playable in one form or another despite its unofficial launch. 

I really don't know what it is about merge puzzlers that's so satisfying. Sometimes, I think it's because it harkens back to the simple days of old memory games, where all you do is match two of a kind to win. 

Oftentimes, I think it's probably just human nature to want to shove two things together and see what happens next.

I'm never going to get to the bottom of this existential conundrum, but whatever it is, Idle Shelter's got all that - plus zombies. And zombies are always cool.

Basically, all you really need to do is plant seeds, harvest plants, and merge them all together to form farmers - how that's even logical is beyond me, but it's enjoyable as heck. You form two things of a kind to form even bigger things, and - as you might expect from the genre - the merging never really ends. 

It's that endless progression that makes the gameplay loop so compelling, to be honest, because it's the best kind of brainless-but-still-kinda-brainy work that functions perfectly as a lovely time-waster on mobile.

All the farming and merging and tapping are means to thwart zombies, of course, because for some reason, plants are always going to be raging against the undead now because of certain peashooters that made the whole conflict vogue in 2009.

Then, after all your hard work tapping and combining, you send farmers to your farm to level them up, craft more structures, and then merge even more stuff over and over again.

That's really all there is to it - and it's glorious.

So, how do you play Idle Shelter?

Download now!

Idle Shelter