Dogpile evaluation
Must Know
What’s it? A roguelike deckbuilder about melding canine collectively.
Launch date December 10, 2025
Count on to pay $10/£8.50
Developer Studio Folly, Toot Video games, Foot
Writer WINGS
Reviewed on Nvidia Geforce RTX 3080, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, 32GB RAM
Steam Deck Playable
Hyperlink Official website
There are some video games that construct their complete expertise round one ultra-satisfying little second. In Dogpile, it is the purpose when two canine of the identical kind contact and, with a chirpy little bark, merge into one greater, increased worth canine.
And if that new canine ought to occur to pop into existence already subsequent to a different canine of the identical kind, and begin off a sequence response of merges that jostles the entire pile round into an avalanche of yaps… oh boy, that is doggy heaven.
Earn sufficient bones (generated by merges) inside 5 palms, and you will earn some upgrades to your canine. Draw the store card, and you need to use cash (additionally generated by merges) to purchase new canine and tags which grant essential bonuses.
The objective is just to create the largest canine accessible—the King—earlier than your pile grows too tall and overflows the pit. Easy and satisfying.
Partly it is a sport of guide dexterity and organisation. The canine obey the whims of physics, permitting me to bounce them into one another, dislodge stacks, and in any other case pull off little trickshots. And there is a talent to piling them up in advantageous methods—stopping low-numbered canine getting trapped beneath high-value ones, and creating groupings prone to result in chain reactions.
Principally, although, it is my deck-building technique that is key to reaching canine concord. Canine upgrades—like Showdog, which makes them earn extra money when merged, or Pack, which grabs one other random canine from my deck after they’re performed—can have a big impact on how palms play out. Tags are inclined to have an excellent greater impact, offering common modifiers that usually synergise with upgrades.
Say I handle to get the Pleasant trait on a number of of my canine early—an improve that makes canine leap in direction of others of the identical kind. I would then wish to choose up the Jupiter tag, which makes my pit zero gravity, and the Limitless Pleasure tag, which makes Pleasant persist by merges. Put that every one collectively, and the result’s a self-sorting pit, with canine aggressively floating in direction of and round one another searching for each merge they’ll.
It is all comparatively simple stuff for any present fan of those sorts of roguelikes, however there are many enjoyable and shocking combos to be found. The satisfaction of lastly clicking collectively a deck that fully breaks the sport stays as intoxicating as it’s within the likes of Slay the Spire or Balatro, even when the journey there may be easier.
Pet love
It helps that Dogpile is so totally charming. Given the abstractness of the core mechanic, this sport actually may have been about something—the idea would not be essentially completely different for those who had been, say, combining plates of meals into greater meals. However having settled for canine, the developer clearly determined they’d be extra than simply window dressing.
Every of the completely different canine varieties is bursting with persona, from tiny, nervous chihuahuas all the way in which as much as the hulking St Bernard that serves as your closing goal. And all the assorted upgrades and tags are distinctly doggy too.
So I am not simply constructing a card draw deck, I am gathering a clan of mud-splattered hounds that love digging in my yard for additional playing cards. I am not simply going for a swarm technique, I am serving to my Pleasant canine discover love collectively in order that the Ought to’ve Been Fastened tag will make them spawn crowds of timid puppies. It is the form of added persona that basically elevates a roguelike and makes my greatest builds really feel all of the sillier and extra chaotic.
Sadly, Dogpile does fall afoul of among the basic pitfalls of the style too. As soon as you have discovered a core technique that works, for instance, it is moderately too simple to simply maintain repeating it—I am losing interest of these aforementioned card-draw engines, however I will be damned if it does not work each time. Extra incentives to combine issues up would go an extended method to giving the expertise longevity.
As is commonly the case, that is exacerbated by the unlock system. As I progress, I am unlocking new tags which might then seem within the store—however the result’s that the pool of potential gadgets is diluted an increasing number of with area of interest choices. That makes it more and more troublesome to place collectively extra elaborate or obscure builds, pushing me all of the extra to stay to those who are extra dependable and fewer tied to the whims of likelihood.
It is an issue that usually separates good roguelikes from nice ones, and within the case of Dogpile it makes it the type of sport that is a pleasure to get obsessive about for 10-15 hours, however a little bit of a drag to return to after that heady honeymoon interval.
And the extra I play it, the extra its scruffier edges current themselves, too. For such a small and easy sport, there is a disappointing lack of polish, with points starting from upgrades not behaving as they need to to tags not working in any respect to, most egregiously, the save/proceed system struggling to precisely put me again the place I used to be. A few early patches have already made some headway in getting Dogpile right into a extra show-ready state, however there’s nonetheless fairly a bit of labor left to be achieved.
Nonetheless, like a beloved pooch who’s simply been sick on my carpet, I can not keep mad at Dogpile for lengthy. Finally that magic combo of satisfying core puzzle and brilliantly foolish canine chaos was endearing sufficient to maintain me going by the sport’s occasional behavioural points, at the very least for lengthy sufficient to really feel prefer it was price choosing up from the pound.