Developed by Zanardi & Liza and published by SOEDESCO, Dog Duty is a real-time tactics shooter inspired by classic games such as Commandos and G.I.Joe. While Commandos certainly laid down the foundation for top-down real-time tactical combat games, Dog Duty further enhances the formula by throwing Mad Max-style vehicular combat in the mix and giving players the option to roam around the free world in their own massive vehicle while looking for trouble. This is our review of the Steam version of Dog Duty in which we run down some bad guys in our hovercraft and sabotage some enemy installations.
The story of Dog Duty sees a group of characters taking down an evil overlord Octopus Commander who is threatening world peace. Your helicopter is shot down by the Octo armies and you are captured. The game starts with you escaping from prison with your squadmates and then you are given a free rein over the territory of Octopus Commander as you take down installations, weaken the Octo-Army and finally take on the Commander in an epic showdown. The game features three unique sectors where you will infiltrate different facilities, take down Octo Army’s major battle machines before you finally take down the Commander. Each sector offers unique environments, facilities, and challenges.
Characters play an important role in how your game plays out in Dog Duty and you have plenty of cool characters to unlock and play with them in the game. As you play the game, you will continue to unlock more characters apart from the initial 3 characters that you unlock in the very first mission in the game. Clearing out enemy POW camps always unlocks a new character for you. While you are only allowed three characters in your squad, you can always mix and match your squad to have the perfect build for different scenarios. Each character comes with its own unique ability and weapon such as a sniper, a heavy with a chain gun, and a soldier with a medkit. You can shuffle between them as you wish and create a custom squad for each scenario.
The characters are not just on their own but some of the characters work great in synergy as well. For example, for me, the best combo was chaingun, shotgun, and a medkit. Chaingun was extremely useful for taking down enemy heavies while the shotgun worked miracles with close-range encounters and crowd control. If one of my soldiers were down, the medkit would come in handy. While all characters can revive fallen squadmates, the medkit can quickly heal the soldier itself and other squad mates as well making it a vital addition to the game. For some missions, I switched out the shotgun one with a sniper so that I could take care of enemies from a safe distance.
Taking over installations is still fun and challenging. While you may think that Dog Duty is just a silly top-down shooter but, in reality, the combat scenarios are pretty challenging, and you cannot clear them until you approach each installation with a clear strategy. Each location is unique and features different types of enemies, turrets, and other placements that could really make your day hell. Depending on your selected squad, you can use their abilities and skills to proceed with a clear strategy by utilizing the Octo-Army’s own arsenal against themselves. You can use the turrets, explosive barrels, and various supplies lying around in installations to your own advantage.
Combat is pretty fun as you use your soldiers, their weapons, and random items to take out enemy soldiers and vehicles. All of your characters share a common backpack where all of your purchased weapons and items are stored. While you can give any weapon to a soldier, the items stay pretty much universal as you simply choose the item such as a Molotov or a grenade, and throw it directly on the battlefield without first assigning them to a character. This makes items use a breeze and allows you a great tactical advantage over your enemies. As compared to the Early Access version of Dog Duty, the in-game shops now offer tons of new items for you to purchase and use in combat scenarios be that on foot or on the vehicle.
Coming to combat encounters itself, one of the problems that I still faced while playing the full release was the character selection mechanic. I would try to select all the units with the mouse and even if all soldiers were inside the selection box, sometimes, one would still not be selected. This causes problems in heavy fights or sudden ambushes where I had to quickly retreat while selecting all of my characters. While it was not quite common but when it happened, it really broke the momentum of the game. For this very reason, most of the time I preferred selecting each character by clicking on their icon and quickly assigning them an order.
Another annoying feature I felt in the game was the absurd amount of reinforcements that keep on arriving while you are trying to take over an installation. Even if you approach an installation silently, enemy reinforcements will just start pouring in like crazy and the tactical aspect just washes away, and the game becomes a hit-and-run scenario. You cannot approach anything in peace until you destroy the satellite dish only then the reinforcements stop coming. This was even funnier because upon their arrival, the reinforcement vehicles would slam into each other and they would just fly over the installation and land on the other side making them look like zero-gravity vehicles.
As you continue to take over an enemy installation in a sector, the enemy starts getting weak and the reinforcements get slower and slower but for the initial bits, the amount is just too much and they make handling missions in a dignified manner extremely difficult. Apart from this, you now also face increased enemies in convoys while you are moving around in your own vehicles. You can now drive a different number of vehicles including a large truck, a big boat, and a hovercraft as well. Purchase different turrets and weapons and mount them on the vehicles and you can use them in convoy attacks. During these combat scenarios, you can either choose to you’re the sheer strength of your vehicle to destroy the enemies by hitting and ramming them or enter the tactical combat screen and assign different turrets and weapons on your vehicles to use against the enemies.
Dog Duty is a fun game and although it does not long last, it is surely fun while it lasts. Defeat the three bosses and then you tackle the final boss and after that, there is not much to do in the game. If would be really cool and the game gets some end-game content because it will certainly increase the life of the game even more. The missions might be short and straight-forward, but they will still require some time as you move around and use different strategies of clearing each installation before finally tackling the sector boss. The full release is so far the best version of the game and if you’ve been holding out on it, now is the time for you to jump in the game and try it out.
Final Verdict:
Dog Duty has come a long way since its Early Access launch and our preview of the game. It certainly looks great and plays great. The developers have really done a good job of making the game as better as possible in nearly all of the aspects. However, it is still not perfect, and some things still need to be worked upon especially the combat system of the game. While it may pass, for the time being, it requires a little more refinement to make sure the game performs as intended during combat scenarios. It offers great amounts of fun as you drive around fighting with road convoys or trying to take over enemy installations but I would still appreciate if the tactical aspect of the combat is worked on some more to make it more refined. Overall, it is a great, open-world action game that will surely keep you occupied for quite some time despite its short story. Highly recommended if you like strategic shooters with open-world action.
Final Score: 8.0/10
