When your Screenshots are More Exciting than your Game
Deckline tricked me into thinking it was a high-concept card game, when it was actually a very low-concept, simple one. Thanks to the ‘trapped in a bunker’ war theming, I thought I was in for something like Inscryption: a game where the card game is only half of the experience. Nope: this is far simpler than that.
Deckline is, in fact, a rudimentary game of Durak. Durak is a Trumps or Knock-Out Wist variant, where a single suit is declared the trump, and each player ‘attacks’ the other by placing a card. The opponent has to beat the card by either out-scoring it or chucking out a trump card. If they fail to do that, the cards on the table are picked up by that player and kept in hand. The winner is the player who empties their hand after emptying the deck.
A Trump That I can get Behind
The only wrinkle to this very simple rule-set is that, if the ‘attacker’ loses, they don’t pick up the cards, and instead the role of attacker moves to the other player. The contested cards are shuffled off the table, never to return. A player can also play multiple attacks of the same number. You can be staring at four aces if you’re particularly unlucky.
That really is all to Durak, and therefore Deckline. You’re seated in front of one of your fellow soldiers, quelling the boredom while shells fall overhead. There is no tournament to play through, no Balatro-like Jokers modifying the deck. This is one card game variant, played once, with different endings based on whether you win or not. Various card compendium games on the Xbox are looking at Deckline and wondering where it got the cheek.
Let’s start with the controls. Deckline isn’t a fantastic game to play on Xbox. I imagine it’s fine on PC or mobile, but with a controller in hand it can be a little stiff. You have to manually lift cards to the middle of the table and then hope that you’ve placed them in the correct hotspot. Deckline has a habit of saying that you can’t play a card when, yes, aksherly, you can. There are single-tap triggers for each card but, again, the system often says no when the card can feasibly be played. I’m not sure what went wrong here.
A Hard Pill to Swallow
There are achievements for looking around the room, clicking on pills to stop the screenshaking from artillery bombardments, and eyeing up your comrades. But Deckline keeps fighting you. It tried to snap me back to the board, when all I wanted to do was look at the lovely work that the environment modellers had done. It only lets you click on the pills if you find the very small click-area somewhere inside the packaging. It’s all a bit janky.
The tutorials are rough. I’ve probably done a better job of describing the game than Deckline does. Having previous knowledge of Durak is welcome, or you could just pull up a Youtube tutorial of the game. But, again, Deckline comes up shorter than it should.
That said, Deckline is a hard Durak player. We have a 50/50 hit-rate of winning against its AI: enough for me to look at the ‘Win 5 games in a row’ and ‘Win 10 games in a row’ achievements and say “nah, mate”. There’s a genuine skill in knowing when to empty your hand of duff cards and when to fire your salvo of three kings at the opponent. When in the flow of the game, having learned how to play, mastered the controls, and ignored the surrounding soldiers, Deckline can be a tough old maid.
Enduring a bit of Durak
The counterpoint is that I’m not a huge fan of Durak as a card game anyway. That’s no real fault of Deckline, of course. The requirement to empty the deck before you win has always irked me. You can win countless hands in a row but it won’t matter, because all 52 cards have to be expended before anything really matters. I find that the final moments can be a little like Mario Kart, as a blue-shell of four kings, multiple trumps and more can knock you off your podium.
There is, of course, also the lack of stuff to do. One card variant, played once, with only a few endings associated with how well you play, does not amount to £5.79 in my view. The slightly awkward controls and UI only cheapens the proposition.
I can’t help look at the war-theming, stare into the dead eyes of my comrade, and wonder what Deckline might have been if it leaned into its oddness more. The outside world never truly interrupts the card gaming, but what if it did? What if I was playing against the enemy, rather than friends – what effect would that have on the stakes? What if we had to move from room to room to avoid destruction, and those rooms had different rulesets?
Flattering to Deceive
Deckline flatters to deceive. It looks so unconventional, like it’s taking aim at the traditional card game. But it is oh so conventional, and it ends up treating its war setting as a fancy playing mat. It’s the traditional game of Durak with the odd artillery shell in the distance.
I’m not sure about you, but I was hoping for more. Deckline may be a competent take on Durak, but it had potential and squandered it. It’s not a mortal wound for anyone hoping to play Deckline, but it’s quite the flesh wound.
Important Links
Deckline Is On Xbox And PC – A War Story Told Through The Power Of Cards – https://www.thexboxhub.com/deckline-is-on-xbox-and-pc-a-war-story-told-through-the-power-of-cards/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/deckline/9P5QWC7G9NTD
