Dogs are pretty cool. Their constant companionship, the way they wag their tails when they are happy, and even the way they can be trained to help some of the most vulnerable people in society just prove that dogs are, without a doubt, very good. That being said, I would much prefer if they were in a game about dropping them into a yard and combining them to make increasingly bigger dogs – thankfully Dogpile scratches that itch spectacularly.
Oddly enough, that itch isn’t caused by fleas but instead by a gap left in the market after the popularity of Suika Game – an unusual phenomenon from 2021 which reached the west in 2023 following a sudden surge in streaming – in which fruits are dropped into a container and combined to make ever-larger fruits before spilling over. It received any number of imitations over the years that followed, but Dogpile instead seeks to expand on this idea, adding a number of card game elements into the mix to freshen up this often rehashed concept.
As you may expect, the gameplay mainly consists of taking dogs of various breeds – all of whom are given a respective number to denote their size – before dropping them into a yard (what we Brits would call a “garden”) in the hopes of knocking two dogs of the same kind together, thus creating one slightly larger dog. It seems simple on the surface, but the popularity of this kind of game comes from its unusual difficulty, especially when dogs start to come in strange shapes and sizes, becoming more difficult to roll or push closer to each other.
Although Dogpile does this concept spectacularly alone, it also has the grace to give players other ways to engage, either by making levels more difficult or granting boons that make each round more manageable. Instead of simply dispensing one random dog at a time, the game provides players with a deck of basic dog cards and asks you to expand, improve and perfect your stack at every turn – the numbering system for the dogs begins to make more sense when associated with card suits, but oddly enough I found it also led me to make comparisons to another hit game of recent years: poker rogue-like Balatro.
Building your perfect dog deck isn’t just as simple as adding cards, as you can also append powerful abilities to help shake up (figuratively and literally) your yard, but the entropy comes with a cost – combining and dropping dogs earns you a net amount of bones and cash, two currencies which influence how you progress. Bones are the main objective, with each round setting a target for how many must be collected – it isn’t game over if you fail, but it will give you a debuff in the process to make progress even more pressing. Cash is more persistent than bones, allowing you to save or spend on various buffs, dog tags or new cards, including dogs with differing traits already attached and trainer cards, which offer special abilities to level the field.
Dog tags and trainer cards are two of your strongest tools as your range of dogs expands, with the former changing how the game plays in increasingly silly ways – varying from simple increases to bones to anti-gravity, which makes your dogs float about the place in absolute chaos – and the latter acting as usable items that convert dogs into cards which can be replayed, drop new attributes onto dogs in the field or clear debuffs – you’d be surprised how often you’ll find yourself trying to clear fleas out of your field of four-legged friends!
Outside of the main way to play, there are also a number of different conditions that can be applied, providing a new challenge and forcing you to play differently. Some of these can be incredibly engaging, forcing you to play more economically by reducing your ways to earn money, but the only game mode that falls short is the stripped-back mode, offering a simple experience in which you drop the smallest dog into the yard and work your way up to larger sizes – though it offers a promise of having no fluff, it also takes out most of the elements which make the game actively engaging; it’s worth trying out, but nobody would blame you for going back to one of the other modes.
Gameplay aside, Dogpile is an absolutely beautiful game, with the dogs, the backgrounds and the UI all lovingly designed in a way that seemed eerily similar to Gubbins – a mobile word game that was not only fun but also partly funded by real-life celebrity Hank Green. You’ll be hardly surprised to hear that these similarities are down to Gubbins‘ creators, Studio Folly, being one of the collaborators behind Dogpile – their simplistic yet goofy art style shines through and combines effortlessly with the strong mechanical aspects of the game to create an engaging experience.
The game isn’t without some frustrations, but where the stripped-back game mode showcases many of these – particularly around how slow the pace can be without any extra tools at your disposal – there’s very little of consequence that affected my time with the game, my only complaint being that it isn’t overtly difficult to complete the primary game mode in a few tries, though given the extra challenges on offer I suspect this might have been intentional in order to hook players into the core loop before draining away their time with more difficult modes.
All of the elements of a strong, enjoyable experience are present in the foundation of Dogpile, and where this would normally be the perfect time in the review to drop a twist and claim there’s something terrible in the gameplay that ruins the experience, this time it’s nothing but pure positivity – as a puzzle game, a rogue-like and a spectacular deck-building time sink, you’ll be hard pressed to find another game as addictive.
