DOGOS Review

An evolution?

I don’t think I’ve played a good shmup – or ‘bullet hell’ – in a long time, which was why I was hesitant to jump into DOGOS – a new entry in a genre that hasn’t aged especially well.

Developer OPQAM have, however, created in DOGOS a fantastic little title that innovates and iterates on classic ideals and comes away as, if nothing else, a promise that this genre ain’t dead yet.

Story:

Earth is beset by alien forces. You play as the only man who has a hope of stopping them. Honestly, I stopped paying attention there. It was unlikely I was ever going to be hooked by the story of a shmup, but DOGOS really didn’t stand a chance. The game sets itself apart from its contemporaries in a lot of ways – more on that later – but narratively speaking DOGOS is a mish-mash of clichés, tired stereotypes, bad writing and even worse voice acting.

Thankfully you can skip through the worst offenders, diary logs that painfully bookend each chapter, but there’s enough mid-mission squawks to annoy you – especially on repeat plays, which the game encourages with its in-mission achievements to chase. It’s almost a mercy that the music irreverently drowns most of them out. Almost.

Gameplay:

Elsewhere, DOGOS is a much better game than I think it realizes. At first glance it’s your typical shmup: a Japanese-inspired scrolling shooter that throws waves of enemies (and bullets) at you to overcome. But within the first minute of play the auto-scroller stops auto-scrolling, and I was dumbfounded when the game asked me to push forward with the analogue stick and actually explore a divergent level. At this point it’s sacrilege to mess with something so ingrained in a genre, right? But it’s this refusal to blindly respect old fashioned rules that gives DOGOS its raison d’être.

Aside from moving your ship around autonomously, you also have control of the games camera. At first this was almost nauseating, the camera spinning sickeningly at my every twitch, but it didn’t take long to get used to this and for it to feel natural, even in the speedy sections which send you barrelling back into auto-scroller mode through narrow trenches (that, frustratingly, are insta-death situations). The new freedom the camera allows really allows for much more engaging dog fights with other ships: circle-strafing enemies, leading shots and dodging incoming fire makes these encounters feel more like an old school FPS than a shmup, but it fits and it feels great.

As if this wasn’t enough, the game throws one more challenge at its players. Combat is split between two planes: enemy aircraft and ground-based tanks or gun emplacements. To combat these foes, players can shoot straight forwards and at a downwards angle with two different weapon sets – simultaneously. This means that tanks can be shooting up at you from below and planes converging on your position and an adept player can tackle these threats at the same time. It makes for complicated battles with plenty to avoid, but it can be overwhelming for new players when they’re first thrown into a crowded arena.

Annoyingly, attacking ground units is somewhat of a hit-and-miss affair, quite literally. A targeting reticule for your ground attacks hovers in front of your ship to show where your bombs will land, but this rarely works out as you might expect. Even taking into account your (and your enemies) movements, the reticule rarely proves accurate – but it’s just when you start to distrust the little square that it will prove true. Throughout my playtime I hypothesized a few reasons as to why this might be – a lot of the time the floor of the stage itself seemed to jut up at odd angles and detonate my bombs early – but in all honesty I don’t know why my bombing runs proved difficult. Eventually I started ignoring the reticule entirely, especially when I unlocked more accurate options such as the ground-based sniper rifle, and most players will be able to similarly develop their own style, but it’s still a shame that such an interesting mechanic is hampered by awkward execution.

I should have known DOGOS meant business when it offered two variants of an easy option. I brazenly chose ‘normal’ and within the hour I was having my skills really tested. The first stage is a fine introduction, with reduced damage and a leisurely pace, but the next few levels made sure I was adept at dodging, weaving and fighting on two planes simultaneously all whilst navigating tight rock formations and utilizing cover. Within a minute of stage two I’d died a couple of times and felt like I was playing an entirely different game.