Stacklands

Genre: Card Game / Survival Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

Stacklands is a Survival Adventure Card Game released in 2024 on PC and Nintendo Switch. This game takes common elements of Survival Adventure games such as workers, resources, and enemies, and reinterprets them as cards to be moved around and stacked in various combinations for different results.

Drag a villager card to a rock, and you can get stone. Drag the villager to wood and you can get a stick. Combine stick and stone cards and you can get a slingshot. Or you can drag a card to sell to get money, which can be spent on card packs that bring randomized resources onto the board, and sometimes enemies too. Sometimes card packs will give players recipes for new card combinations, though players can discover these combinations themselves through trial and error, or by common sense – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you’ll get if you drag a raw meat card on top of a campfire, for example.

The game plays out in real-time, with meters filling up as processes complete. Players can pause the game anytime they want to check menus or rearrange cards, but they are limited in their time once they unpause, as every in-game day requires that your villagers all have enough to eat. Furthermore, the game won’t wait for you while you take your time experimenting and gathering resources, as enemies will appear every now and then, along with other events that will change the situation. What’s more, the end of an in-game day also forces you to sell off cards in excess of your maximum, though before long you can build storage sheds to increase this maximum.

The presentation here is very simple – 2D cards on a 2D background, with crudely-drawn images that don’t animate. This is backed by a relaxed soundtrack that seems to indicate this is meant to be a thoughtful, contemplative experience.

Overall, this is enjoyable, though I do think there are a few frustrating design choices here. First, the real-time element doesn’t seem to make much sense, given that you can pause at any time – it’s just a frustrating element that forces you to keep pausing and unpausing the game, and then waiting for things to happen once you unpause. It would have made far more sense for the game to measure time as a numerical resource that players could freely tick down or rush through to the next occurrence.

Another issue is this game’s menus, which are poorly-organized and awkward to navigate. For that matter, even simply buying things is unnecessarily tedious, as you need to drag the gold coins from the play area to the purchase you want, instead of just clicking on the purchase and having it automatically deduct your coins. These are things you need to do frequently throughout the game too, so it’s a constant irritation that’s just unnecessary.

Still, despite this game’s frustrations, Stacklands is an enjoyable and refreshing take on the genre that’s well worth a try for Survival Adventure fans looking for something a bit different. The Card Game element is an inspired addition to this formula, and even if it’s clumsily-implemented at times, this is nevertheless a unique and enjoyable game.

tl;dr – Stacklands is a Survival Adventure game played with the mechanics of a real-time Card Game, and this combination is refreshing and enjoyable, even if there are some irritating mechanical issues and poor design choices keeping this from being even better. Despite this, the compelling gameplay and unique core idea make this well worth seeking out for Survival Adventure fans.

Grade: B

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Best Card/Board/Dice Game

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