Stacklands is a twist on management games: every object in the game, from people to buildings to resources to money, is represented by a card on the game board. These cards interact through being stacked on top of one another, causing an item to be equipped, a building to be built from the required materials, or a production cycle to be initiated. By producing excess goods and selling them, the player can buy booster packs, which unlock new cards and new recipes for buildings and items. Over time, new areas are unlocked, as well as powerful foes to do battle against.
The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.
What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.
There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.
On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.
The game takes place over turns called moons, which last for a few real time minutes. At the end of each moon, all your villagers have to be fed -- if there's not enough food cards, unfed villagers will starve and die. Aside from that, random events may occur between moons, some of which force your people into battle, and that may also result in their demise. Either way, should you run out of people cards at any moment, the game ends. It's easy to understand in theory, but Stacklands teaches little and forces the player to learn everything from experience, making the early game rocky. And that is but the first of its problems.
What could have been an outstanding game is merely fine, thanks to some questionable design choices and a rough execution. In Stacklands. annoyance is part of the game's mechanics: cards collide with one another and push each other off to the sides, messing up the board and adding some annoying glitches to the mix. Some cards allow for making compact stacks of the same type of card, or guiding your villagers towards certain foods, but those take time and resources to make and only solve part of the problems. Fundamentally, though, the floatiness of the game's objects eliminates their physicality as cards, downgrading Stacklands from an interesting card game to a more generic management one.
There's also a severe lack of quality of life options. If playing on the Steam Deck, you'll immediately feel it in your hands: the controller support is awful, if not on its own, because of glitches stemming from a misuse of Unity's (admittedly terrible) UI navigation system. That the game should not have the Steam Deck Verified seal is a given, but even playing with a mouse, the UI could have been so much more helpful, like by allowing for certain shortcuts, warning about finished tasks, or the presence and position of enemies and the like. It could also provide more guidance, not just in the beginning of the game, but also, when you're about to do something that would, I don't know, summon an incredibly powerful boss that might end your run or something.
On that note, Stacklands should not have had permadeath. Yes, I know card-based roguelikes are all the rage nowadays, but that doesn't mean just any card-adjacent game should have permadeath in it: a full run of Stacklands with the current updates takes upwards of ten hours. Imagine dying to the final boss and having to redo everything -- I almost feel bad for saying Dead Cells had it bad with its deaths. A save option, even if it was a consumable item you had to create with rare materials, would have been welcome.