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DOGOS Review

by Omar (@siegarettes)

• DOGOS
  
• Developer- OPQAM
  
• Publisher- INTERNET URL S.A.
  
• PS4, PC (Steam), Xbox One
  

Even among the recent revival of SHMUPs, DOGOS, by developers OPQAM, immediately makes an impression. Rather than looking to immitate the more commonly mined arcade titles, DOGOS builds itself in the tradition of European PC shooters. Instead of being led down a tunnel of enemies, you’ll move between mazes, canyons, and open arenas, taking on a variety of objectives as you progress. There’s a focus on detailed graphics and environments, and an overall more open approach to a genre that’s often driven by a perpetual forward momentum. DOGOS, if nothing else, attempts to shake up the common formulas of the genre. How successful it is, that’s a bit more complicated. 

Playing DOGOS begins with a literal shift in perspective. Instead of the usual top down view, DOGOS keeps your ship relatively centered while rotating the world around it. It can initially feels a bit dizzying, but it eventually feels more natural. It makes it easy to keep track of your direction and aim, giving it an almost first person shooter style approach to navigation. This helps both as you circle-strafe around enemies, and for lining up your cursor for targeting ground enemies. This can lead to some frantic interplay between the two planes of combat, moving your focus between flying enemies and ground based turret and tanks. This is particularly true after you unlock the other two ground based weapons, which on occasion bring to mind the satisfying rockets from G. Rev’s Under Defeat. This is also, unfortunately, where the game’s problems begin.

While initially impressive, the visuals begin to impede your ability to properly read a situation. The screen becomes blocked out with the glow of bullets, and the level of detail within the backgrounds create a lot visual noise, which causes both bullets and enemies difficult to parse. On top of that, tracking ground enemies is made more difficult by the inaccuracy of the weapons. While hits can occasionally be satisfying, many times of combination of slow moving projectiles, enemy movement, or inertia from you ship can cause the targeting cursor to give you an inaccurate idea of where your attacks will land. Even if you learn to lead targets, your attacks often feel underpowered, requiring you to continually hammer even basic enemies to take them down. This is a problem that extends to your primary weapons, especially when fighting larger targets. This problem compounds with numbers of enemies and bullets that go beyond challenging, and into the unmanageable. 

While the attack patterns might initially bring to mind modern manic shooters, they’re often combined with erratic attacks from fodder enemies that encourage you to play conservatively and stay out of range instead of being aggressive. This results in numerous situations that feel more like tests of patience than of creative play. The most egregious example of this was one boss, who laid down complicated bullet patterns, but could be safely, if more slowly, defeated by waiting off to the side and dodging the bullets entirely, taking potshots between waves of shots. 

All these frustrations reach their peak in the later half of the game, where the already absurd number of enemies increases further, and navigation sections are introduced that force you to carefully time your movements between laser walls, which will kill you instantly on contact. These sections become more and more complicated, requiring precision that isn’t conducive to the inertia driven movement of your ship. 

This is illustrative of the fundamental problems with DOGOS: instead of ramping up the challenge by playing with the elements that exist, it instead lays on more of them, to its detriment. More enemies, more bullets, more instant death traps. This is turn exasperates the pacing problems made by the open arenas and unreliable, underpowered weapons. Instead of taking the offensive to keep enemies at bay, I found myself avoiding conflict entirely, only destroying objectives as needed, and rationing out health pickups to counteract unavoidable damage. 

DOGOS is a project with a lot of obvious passion behind it, with a clear sense of ambition. Unfortunately, so many of its interesting ideas are marred by fundamental problems with its basic structure. It’s not irredeemable, but the longer I played it the more my frustrations with it began to overshadow the moments of enjoyment. At its core, there’s probably something worthwhile in DOGOS, but you’ll have a hard time excavating it out of the problems it’s buried under.