Stacklands

Stacklands is an excellent little survival card game that’s quite unlike anything else on the market. It’s cute, deeply addictive, and has the potential to take away hours of your life, although its implementation on Switch leaves a lot of room for improvement. Still, if I can spend 40 hours stacking chickens on top of each other to make eggs, then it can’t really be that bad, can it?

Certainly, I had a delightful time spinning the different plates of progress and preventative maintenance to build the systems necessary for an expanding world in Stacklands. It has a pleasant and engaging set of systems fueled by deck building that feels complementary, not shoehorned in. Difficulty is reasonable, and provided meaningful experience that informed each future run. Some fiddly controls couldn’t deter my enjoyment, and this’ll stay in my rotation for some time.

Stacklands is a really enjoyable game. It combines a clever survival loop of exploration and optimization, it is easy to grasp the core concepts and get your runs moving, and it definitely grabs your attention with the "just one more turn" hallmark of the best of these type of round, time, or turn based games. The only real drawback here is the Switch, or rather how uninterested this game is of making use of what makes the Switch great. It's fine when docked on to your tv or monitor, just as if it were still running on the PC. I'm thankful the developers have brought it over so Switch players can get to play it, I am just recognizing not optimizing it for a 6.2 inch touchscreen is a missed opportunity.

In its current state, Stacklands is a fantastic game held back by some interface issues on Nintendo Switch. If you have the option to play it with a mouse or touch controls on Steam, I recommend getting it there. The Switch version and the controller support in general for the game need a bit more work for the game to be an easier recommendation. Stacklands has definitely sent me down the Sokpop Collective rabbit hole and I’ve been checking out some of the team’s other games. Hopefully we see some more come to the console soon.