The era of cute, cosy and creative games is upon us. As indie devs around the world fight to turn the tide against an onslaught of slop, unique and inspired titles stand out, championed for their hand-drawn styles and quirky gameplay loops. This is where you will find Stackmon, a wonderfully weird card-collecting strategy game.
A Whole New World
From the get-go, Stackmon oozes style and charm. Your instructor is a bizarre old man who appears super animated despite not being animated or having a voice-over. He introduces you to the world of Stackmon and to his new guild, which aims to bring harmony to Gaia.
It is your job as the latest recruit to cross the continent and confront the other guild leaders and defeat them in battle. But before you can set off on your greatest adventure, there are some mechanics you need to wrap your head around.
Your First Stackmon
The Stackmon tutorial does a great job of introducing you to the mechanics of opening card packs and stacking those cards to craft other cards. You are given the choice of three Stackmon cards and shown how to use them in battle.
Largely, every mechanic boils down to stacking your cards; thus the name. Stack your player and creature cards on resource cards to break them into other resource cards. You can then combine and stack resources with craftable buildings and tools to craft other items. It’s a pretty extensive crafting system with no limitations stopping you from uncovering recipes for yourself with some experimentation.
Off To Adventure
The over-world map gives you access to seven unique biomes with multiple levels in each. Progressing through each level requires you to defeat the level quest, which is usually a defeat-the-trainer-type goal. These quests are hidden in card packs that drop random items and events to help or hinder your progress, so each adventure offers the chance for something new to uncover.
How you tackle these will be a matter of preference, but you have a limited number of Action Points (AP) that you can use before being forced to return to camp. You can open all the packs at once and have all the cards on the screen, but this runs the risk of you biting off more than you can chew and ending your run early. However, each action takes time, and waiting too long to make a decision can be just as detrimental to your team as a miss-click. You can pause time; however, I often found myself forgetting or miss-clicking and wasting a lot of my time.
Each biome also offers new challenges and new Stackmon for you to face. The mountains face rock-slides, and the desert holds hidden caverns and deadly heatwaves that will end your adventure and send you back to camp before you’ve finished opening your booster packs. They aren’t easy obstacles to overcome, but with the right team and a bit of luck, anything is possible.
The Heart Of Battle
Battling other trainers to prove your worth and convince them to acknowledge your guild is at the core of the plot progression. It’s largely boiled down to pitting one card against another and waiting for the attack gauge to fill before your creatures release an attack. This is pretty automated, and wild cards will move around the table before attaching themselves to one of your stacks to initiate battle.
As your cards level up, you unlock skills and passive attributes which you can trigger. Again, these have a timer attached, but it’s not terrible and is often worth the wait. You can also pause mid-battle to think of your next steps and arrange your cards for the coming round.
Gotta Stack ‘Em All
There are over 100 Stackmon to collect, level and evolve, with shiny, rare and legendary editions for players to uncover. Some are in areas which require some problem-solving to access, while others are in fossils and eggs. Searching through tall grass, fishing in ponds and event cards will also give you a chance to encounter wild Stackmon for you to defeat and capture with a totem.
Capturing cards doesn’t automatically add them to your team. First, you will need to return home and build a house for your Stackmon, which is a difficult task early on. Then you need to stack your creature card on the house to assign it, and remember to put it in your backpack when you go exploring.
The Nitty Gritty
While the Stackmon system is pretty crunchy, it is as fun as it is forgiving. Daily tasks drop with each sunrise, and you can sell unwanted cards for booster packs to try and get what you need without leaving the base.
This is where I started to feel overwhelmed by the Stackmon game board. My screen soon became littered with stacks of cards that I was saving for crafting. Sure, I could craft chests to hold thirty of a single item, but they used up resources, took time to craft and still gave me a card to litter my table. The grid tool to help you place stacks neatly takes some of the pressure off, but this is soon undone as a new card pops into existence and throws it all out of whack.
I feel like this is the devs encouraging us to sell resources and constantly cycle through all the cheaper resources, but that’s not how card collecting works in my brain. As any good RPG player knows, you always keep everything you find – just in case.
Style And Charm
I found almost every aspect of Stackmon utterly delightful. The character designs are unique and varied, with a hand-drawn, cartoonish quality. Each biome boasts simple yet varied backdrops, with musical accompaniment that encourages focused gameplay.
From the user interface to the way packs unfold, Stackmon works hard to capture the essence of playing card games while elevating the mechanics with in-game effects. Everything feels very tactile and comes together to create a well-polished and enjoyable adventure with some twists I’ve left for you to uncover.
Despite the cartoonish style, younger players could struggle with some of the more intricate recipes and puzzles. However, there is a lot of room for failure, and I never felt punished for my mistakes.
Stacked To The Top
I really enjoyed my time with Stackmon. It’s not a game that you can rush; it’s one that you will want to consider each move and pause regularly to reach the best possible outcome. It felt more rogue-like than an RPG, as you build up action points to go out and explore until hitting a wall and returning to camp, but this works to its advantage. Similarly, some way to better organise your home base or an inventory overview wouldn’t go amiss, but I understand the vision.
Stackmon is a brilliant card-battling and crafting adventure with lots to offer players. This is a strong release for Riftpoint Entertainment, and I look forward to seeing what they have planned for the future.
Platforms: Steam
Publishers: Alibi Games
Developers: Riftpoint Entertainment
Played On: Steam
Key Provided By: Keymailer
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