CardLife has been in an Alpha in early access for the last few months. It’s from Freejam games, the company who previously made RoboCraft. It’s a title built around your own creativity, well that and card.
Because everything is made of card. It’s only as resilient as card. The gameplay places great emphasise on customisability, everything within the sandbox is customisable. The other half of the game is survival based. It keeps the sandbox elements interesting and adds a level of difficulty in crafting your card world. It’ll be a title that is made or broken by its community management. Its early access has already seen players creating expansive worlds on joint servers. Even playing privately though, it’s the sort of relaxing experience you can sink a lot of time into.
Connect the Dots
CardLife’s most unique feature is it’s crafting system. Everything is made of card, so all the card can be cut up and sliced back together however you like. Each item, building or object, is made up of a few pieces of card making the basic shape. Using a mouse, you then draw on these pieces to cut out card in whatever shape or design you want for the piece. As long as your drawing hits the dots that are necessary for structure, you can draw these things however you want.
If you want a keyblade sword, you can do that. Weird misshapen hand drawn Pikachu for your character’s face? That’s fine too. This system extends to the look of your character, and to animals you can modify to make creature companions. You can rearrange a wolf you found to make him the cartoon facsimile of your dog. Or Hamster, or Cat, or whatever else you want to draw. The dot structure also allows every cardboard creation to be rendered as inter-slotting pieces, preventing your own creation looking disjointed.
Some of the buildings that already exist in the pre-release servers are pretty impressive. This sort of community focused building will make CardLife a similar experience to Minecraft, but one with a distinctly hand made aesthetic. Customising your buildings to such a larger degree allows for a lot of complexity. The mouse dragging is imperfect, but these little kinks remind you that they are hand made.
CardLife is Not Finished
The game has quite a lot of features announced, but they just aren’t all there yet. The nature of such an early release means the game will respond to community needs, but early adopters should also be aware that it is an unfinished game. Features the developers are looking to implement include raids, deeper player versus player aspects, a creative mode to and adding in different time zones. The full list of features in ambitious, with world changing events and different technological eras setting it apart from other Minecraft like titles.
CardLife looks like a promising sandbox, the sort of game that you could sink hours into as relaxation. The current build of the game is small, but polished. The connect the dots system is unique. This gives you a very polished, but still open system for creativity. Playing around with it is a lot of fun. For now, the game is quite small. There are a lot of features missing at the moment, but it’s a promising start.
CardLife will release on Steam sometime in October
