This is a disappointing one because I think the gameplay itself is fine and enjoyable, but there are too many bugs and unpolished bits for this to be a good game. Wild Country is a deckbuilding turn-based card game with a sizable hub world that you can freely explore and discover side quests in between matches. It has a woodland animals theme and a pleasant art direction.

The premise of the game is that you're one of the many animal denizens of the region (I picked a fox) and a new mayor needs to be elected. The outgoing mayor announces that everybody who wants to be mayor needs to compete against each other in a card game called "Wild Country™" because the game requires wisdom, patience, strategy, and other traits that a good mayor should have. Whoever becomes the champion of the region gets to be the next mayor.

The card game itself is probably a variant of something more popular and well known, but I'm not savvy enough to identify if that's the case. Each turn you get cards that typically represent buildings like houses, commercial businesses (i.e. gas stations, taco stands), or other things like power plants and police stations. Your goal is to build up a town on a hexagon-based grid and create a town that generates enough money to reach the victory amount before your opponent does. Cards have different costs for playing them, and some buildings take multiple turns to be constructed before they confer benefits. Buildings also have different bonuses or penalties depending on what they're built next to.

I feel like inserting a thought I had while playing in here: why would animals be concerned with building profitable towns full of stuff like gas stations and power plants? The hub world itself doesn't seem to have very many buildings at all, just woodlands, so maybe the animals created this card game as an imitation of human civilization but not so much their own? There are some animals that drive cars, so I guess you need gas stations for that. I don't know, it seems weird to me that animals would care about urban growth when their instinct is to live sustainably within the nature around them.

The resource for playing cards during matches is an acorn meter that gains +1 maximum acorns each time it's your turn, up to a cap of 9. Each of your turns these acorns are fully replenished up to the current cap. This forces the game into a controlled flow where early game is slow since you can only build cheap things, mid-game speeds up and is probably where most matches are won/lost, and late game brings out special buildings, powerful cards for attacking your opponent's town, or rapid building of lots of cheaper structures in a single turn. One notable downside, though, is that the card game moves at a naturally slow pace. Animations take several seconds to complete, there are built in pauses before turns change between players, and there's no way to speed any of this up.

Going back to the oddities of Wild Country's theme, it's interesting that this city-building card game has an infinitely replenishing mana resource for playing your cards. In terms of a card game rule this makes sense, but within the greater theme there's an unexamined implication that the animals are just logging and destroying their own habitats rapidly for the sake of living in human-style societies. At some point there would be consequences: a lack of resources for building new things, rising pollution, etc. Clearly I'm thinking about the ecological undertones of this game much more than the developers intended.

Most of this game's bugs are found in wandering the hub world and when engaging the UI. NPC animations will sometimes break, which is usually harmless and kind of funny looking. The UI brings problems like inconsistent or broken controls for opening and closing menus. I'll get trapped on some screens until I jury rig an escape route. While in the hub world it's not a big deal, just annoying. If I'm in an actual match, though, it's more serious.

You're supposed to be able to examine the cards in your hand or those already played on the board during your turn, but that function can break sometimes. There's no fixing this, you have to hope it fixes itself and deal with no longer being able to read all the details of cards and buildings in the meanwhile. Cards with timers (like construction periods for bigger buildings) can bug out and stop progressing sometimes. I had a game where two buildings of mine never became active the whole match because the timers stopped working.

An even worse version of this is a bug related to playing cards that inflict the "freeze" effect. Freezing enemy buildings is supposed to prevent them from producing any money or other effects for 3 turns, but I had occasions where the freeze timer never counted down at all. I used a blizzard card on my opponent that was meant to freeze a few random buildings of theirs temporarily and instead those buildings were made useless for the entire match. That's game breaking and I was able to replicate this in another match right after I first encountered it, so it can't be that rare of an issue. I'm not even that far into the game, so how is something like this not patched by the developers when it's showing up early on? This game has an online multiplayer mode, so I can only guess that not enough people played it because I'm sure there'd be plenty of complaints about broken timers and freeze effects otherwise.

It's too bad. I think this is fairly pleasant to play when things work properly, so in theory this could be an above-average game, or a good one, even. As it stands, though, this is an example of glitches and a lack of polish causing a nice game to unravel.