Dogpile review

There are some games that build their entire experience around one ultra-satisfying little moment. In Dogpile, it's the point when two dogs of the same type touch and, with a chirpy little bark, merge into one bigger, higher value dog.

And if that new dog should happen to pop into existence already next to another dog of the same type, and start off a chain reaction of merges that jostles the whole pile around into an avalanche of yaps… oh boy, that's doggy heaven.

Dogpile wisely doesn't overcomplicate that core joy. The format is simple. Each hand, you draw three dogs from your deck, and choose where to drop them into the pit.

Earn enough bones (generated by merges) within five hands, and you'll earn some upgrades for your dogs. Draw the shop card, and you can use money (also generated by merges) to buy new dogs and tags which grant crucial bonuses.

The goal is simply to create the biggest dog available—the King—before your pile grows too tall and overflows the pit. Simple and satisfying.

Partly it's a game of manual dexterity and organisation. The dogs obey the whims of physics, allowing me to bounce them into each other, dislodge stacks, and otherwise pull off little trickshots. And there's a skill to piling them up in advantageous ways—preventing low-numbered dogs getting trapped beneath high-value ones, and creating groupings likely to lead to chain reactions.

Mostly, though, it's my deck-building strategy that's key to achieving canine harmony. Dog upgrades—like Showdog, which makes them earn more money when merged, or Pack, which grabs another random dog from my deck when they're played—can have a huge impact on how hands play out. Tags tend to have an even bigger effect, providing universal modifiers that often synergise with upgrades.

Say I manage to get the Friendly trait on a few of my dogs early—an upgrade that makes dogs leap towards others of the same type. I might then want to pick up the Jupiter tag, which makes my pit zero gravity, and the Endless Joy tag, which makes Friendly persist through merges. Put that all together, and the result is a self-sorting pit, with dogs aggressively floating towards and around each other seeking every merge they can.

It's all relatively straightforward stuff for any existing fan of these kinds of roguelikes, but there are plenty of fun and surprising combos to be discovered. The satisfaction of finally clicking together a deck that completely breaks the game remains as intoxicating as it is in the likes of Slay the Spire or Balatro, even if the journey there is simpler.

Puppy love

It helps that Dogpile is so utterly charming. Given the abstractness of the core mechanic, this game really could have been about anything—the concept wouldn't be fundamentally different if you were, say, combining plates of food into bigger meals. But having settled for dogs, the developer clearly decided they would be more than just window dressing.

Each of the different dog types is bursting with personality, from tiny, nervous chihuahuas all the way up to the hulking St Bernard that serves as your final objective. And all the various upgrades and tags are distinctly doggy too.

So I'm not just building a card draw deck, I'm gathering a clan of mud-splattered hounds that love digging in my yard for extra cards. I'm not just going for a swarm strategy, I'm helping my Friendly dogs find love together so that the Should've Been Fixed tag will make them spawn crowds of timid puppies. It's the kind of added personality that really elevates a roguelike and makes my best builds feel all the sillier and more chaotic.

Unfortunately, Dogpile does fall afoul of some of the classic pitfalls of the genre too. Once you've found a core strategy that works, for example, it's rather too easy to just keep repeating it—I'm getting bored of those aforementioned card-draw engines, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work every time. More incentives to mix things up would go a long way to giving the experience longevity.

As is often the case, that's exacerbated by the unlock system. As I progress, I'm unlocking new tags which can then appear in the shop—but the result is that the pool of possible items is diluted more and more with niche options. That makes it increasingly difficult to put together more elaborate or obscure builds, pushing me all the more to stick to those that are more reliable and less tied to the whims of chance.

It's a problem that often separates good roguelikes from great ones, and in the case of Dogpile it makes it the sort of game that's a joy to get obsessed with for 10-15 hours, but a bit of a drag to return to after that heady honeymoon period.

And the more I play it, the more its scruffier edges present themselves, too. For such a small and simple game, there's a disappointing lack of polish, with issues ranging from upgrades not behaving as they should to tags not working at all to, most egregiously, the save/continue system struggling to accurately put me back where I was. A couple of early patches have already made some headway in getting Dogpile into a more show-ready state, but there's still quite a bit of work left to be done.

Still, like a beloved pooch who's just been sick on my carpet, I can't stay mad at Dogpile for long. Ultimately that magic combo of satisfying core puzzle and brilliantly silly canine chaos was endearing enough to keep me going through the game's occasional behavioural issues, at least for long enough to feel like it was worth picking up from the pound.