Dogos is a fast paced, action packed twin stick shooter which puts you up against an aggressive hoard of air and ground enemy’s that envelop you with both their presence and the shear volume of projectiles, heat seeking missiles and electrical stun waves that root you to the spot leaving you a sitting duck. Using quick thinking and the reflexes of a cat you can gun your way through the first few levels with relative ease, then it starts to get tough. Even though i’d set the difficulty to medium I might as well have set it to impossible.
As you set out on your journey down a tight twisting maze like arena the game is just warming up, teaching you what to expect. It throws a handful of planes at you that get easily dispatched with the right trigger, a plethora of tanks and ground vehicles that you destroy with the left trigger. It lulls you into a false sense of security and with each corridor or large expanse the tempo is slowly turned higher and higher.
Objectives seem to get harder, levels get longer, checkpoints get further and further apart although they are dreadfully spaced out to start with. Death seems to embrace you more and more frequently but you do earn small upgrades along the way which do help with exterminating the massive press of the enemy invasion. Including a special weapon slot which vaporises most things in range with a satisfying burst of homing missiles or a blanket of electrical discharge to clear a path or helping to escape a sticky situation. Then boss battles enter the fray, hardened machines of destruction spewing volley after volley after you in unpredictable arcs, a few mistakes and your not flying out alive.
When the game gets tough though, it gets frustrating. Some of the checkpoints you reach can be quite far apart and once you’ve cleared out a section, destroyed all the objectives which can be a painstaking and lengthy task to then move onto another equally hazardous arena be killed and have to start back at the previous area gets really old quick. Also the game sadly is quite basic, you pick from two ships, get to unlock and select a few weapons and change it’s colour.
Other games in it’s genre allow you to change weapons as you play through power ups collected from your fallen victims, add more diversity and let you customise your experience by allowing you to level up the ship by placing points into attack or defence. This game offers none of that and while it’s a pretty enjoyable experience to begin with it doesn’t push me to want to play more, plus it feels the difficulty settings are slightly off. Very easy could be completed blindfolded, easy isn’t a challenge yet medium is a bit to much and is the setting i’ve been playing on. I’m still hoping to complete it but it’s a slow process, selecting hard is like running through waist deep treacle while being attacked by bees.
Overall the game is bad, it does everything it’s designed to do, it just feels bland in a genre teeming with some fantastic twin stick shooters like Blue Rider which I played for weeks. I score this game 6/10 because I just didn’t connect with it, I just wasn’t connected to the gameplay or storyline enough to want to play it.
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary Sony Playstation 4 code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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