Stacklands Review | The Perfect Steam Gift for All Your Friends
The chill vibes and simplistic charm of this tiny card-based village builder are more than worth what you’ll pay for it and will leave you…
Stacklands on Steam
Stacklands is a village builder where you stack cards to collect food, build structures, and fight creatures. 🃏 For…store.steampowered.com
The chill vibes and simplistic charm of this tiny card-based village builder are more than worth what you’ll pay for it and will leave you wanting more after you’ve 100%’d the game. NameBrand.
Stacklands is really interesting and strangely captivating! I found myself playing it in between some other games initially, but before I knew it, it got its hooks in me and I found myself coming back non-stop until I beat the game, and until I completed the game. I even stuck around after 100% completion, just to keep building my village to see how autonomous I could make things and witness how powerful I could become.
It might be a little short, coming in around 5–10 hours, but it passes one of my essential metrics of 1$ USD per hour of play. I paid $5 for it, and I’ve played it for just over 5 hours. Not only that, but I enjoyed every second of my time with it.
Stacklands is largely about resource management, and making sure that your villagers always have food to munch on. Beyond that, you have to make sure you have a strong enough army to combat any enemies that seem to wander into your portion of the world. The multi-tasking between gathering and hunting and making food can get you distracted pretty quickly! I lost quite a few of my little villagers because I was too busy to notice that the food supply had gotten a little low, or on the flip-side, forgotten to make weapons. It’s fun in the late game to get a lot of these tasks automated, and I found myself needing gold less and less frequently, to the point where I wasn’t spending any at all. That progression makes things sound a bit unbalanced here in writing, but it’s all a very natural evolution of the gameplay loop.
One complaint to mention just of preference: I don’t like how the cards are pushed around. I wish there was a way to lock down cards in specific locations. I understand the mechanic of the monsters moving around the board is essential, but I wish after combat, everything could return to “their places” that I assign, just to help with my OCD of everything needing and having a place. Maybe, this could be rectified with chests that work similarly to coin chests, but could be for designated items?
Once you start to grow your operations, the board just gets overtaken with cards, and it’s difficult to monitor everything you have going on. Which I think is a part of the difficulty, but I wish it wasn’t, to an extent. That way, instead of fixating on how my cards look, and what cards are where, I could focus more on the strategy of what I should be doing with my resources, my villagers, etc.
At any rate, I recommend it, and I think that the vast majority of people who try it will enjoy it enough to get their money’s worth out of it.
I also think it needs to be mentioned that I do know about the Sokpop Collective’s primary business model (a new game every month with a $3 subscription), and within those time constraints, it makes Stacklands an even more impressive feat than it already is. Also, there is DLC which I haven’t tried but am sure is great!
I hope that the devs seriously consider the success of Stacklands, so much so that they start to discontinue their monthly release schedule, in favor of making a feature-length game that can appropriately absorb all of the talent they have in their studio. It doesn’t have to be in the Stacklands direction, but it’s clear to me that regardless of what it would be, it would be met with nothing but success and praise because Stacklands is an absolute hit.
Originally published 27 May 2022 at https://backloggd.com.