Merge Cooking

You start by meeting Lea, your assistant, who guides you into opening a merge restaurant. The basic move is simple: tap, drag and merge ingredients into better ones, then serve the customers waiting for dishes.

The game needs Android 7.0 or newer. It runs offline, so you can open it without Wi-Fi once it is installed, and there are no time limits on the puzzles.

Cooking is more than merging. Seven pieces of equipment, including a frying pan, juice blender, oven and cocktail shaker, handle the preparation step. Ingredients range from cheese and vegetables to lobster and champagne.

Progress moves city by city. Eggs Benedict belongs to New York, Tom Yam Gong to Bangkok, sushi to Tokyo and escargot to Paris, and a new famous dish unlocks each day. Restaurant themes such as fast food, BBQ and seafood give the renovation side some variety, and you collect souvenirs along the way.

Characters add a light story layer, such as an American restaurant owner who coaches football and a picky French manager.

Merge Cooking is a puzzle with simulation touches, so it will not satisfy anyone who wants to build a single dish by hand or manage a large town. For pizza-focused play, Pizza Ready! and Good Pizza are closer matches. Foodstars: Merge & Cook stays in the same merge genre, while CookieRun: Kingdom is a different kind of game altogether.

Players who dislike ads or purchase prompts in free games should also look elsewhere.

Merge Cooking comes from Happibits Game and is distributed through Google Play, which carries its own checks. The content rating is Everyone. It shows ads and sells in-app items, so watch spending settings on shared devices.