Dogs of War Review

The year is 2161. The Earth colonized Primus IV in order to exploit its reserves of SL18 element. Forty years later the colonists rebel against the oppression and exploitation and declare independence from Earth. They hire an elite group of mercenaries called War Monkeys to protect them from Earth's Expeditionary Forces. The situation gets even worse when some aliens (who everyone considered long extinct) turn out of the blue and threaten to destroy the population of Primus.

This is but a short outline of the plot introduced by Talon Soft's new action-strategy, which gives you the role of either the commander of Earth's Expeditionary Force or the defender of Primus. The game is in full 3D surroundings giving you complete control over the situation. There are two modes of command: classical and direct. The classical mode allows you to select your units and issue orders, and the direct mode puts you in direct charge of one specific unit. The AI of other units can be set to Stan By or Active mode in the mean time. Units in Stand By mode will fire only under explicit command, while units set to Active give their best to disintegrate anything in site.

The mission concept was good, but they eventually turned out to be pretty boring because they all come down to chasing and exterminating all that moves. That doesn't mean they are too easy; the enemy units are usually greater in numbers and hold better positions, whereas your tactical possibilities have been quite limited. There is usually just one way to your goal and the enemy occupies it. The concept of combining artillery with melee units was great but they could have provided some more scouting units to make full use of the concept. This way, when you see an enemy unit it can surely see you too, so it's just a matter of who's got the most powerful long-ranged units. This makes diversions and sly tactical moves almost impossible.

The units are numerous and varied. You will command all sorts of infantry, tanks, artillery, transports and so on. This versatility should have provided sufficient combinations for developing specific tactics, but for reasons already described, it just doesn't. This is best illustrated on urban terrains where you can see an enemy only if your unit is located in the same street. Here's where all tactic goes to waste, because the man with the bigger gun will always overcome the weaker foe. For a unit to function, you must supply it with human crew. The number of the obligatory crew will depend on the type of the unit. The soldiers you command gather experience in battles. Greater experience will make the soldier act more quickly, and aim better. This will make you choose crew carefully and look after your experienced units.

The enemies are also numerous and varied. Your human adversaries will have mostly the same units as you will, with slightly different names or characteristics. They are not too intelligent when attacking: They just get stuck at a certain point and let you slaughter them all. When they defend a position, they are usually given topographical advantage, which makes fighting them a bit harder. The Mantai (the alien race) are somewhat different. They move around in large groups and your only hope of destroying them lies in the proper use of long-ranged weaponry from where they cannot reach you. They have several units at disposal, ranging from the tiniest and very vulnerable ones to massive, virtually indestructible monsters.

The graphics and sound are mediocre and long surpassed. The terrain is decently textured and modeled but the buildings look pathetic. The unit design is far from being inventive, and when you zoom in on them you can see their polygons more than you would like to. The special effects that mostly come down to several different explosions are completely outdated. The only beautiful graphics here can be seen in the intro, which is really outstanding.

The sound is even less impressive than the graphics. The sound effects are OK, but they are still far behind some thing we could here in recent games. There is not much digitized speech present: there are just a couple of phrases that keep repeating and soon become annoying. The music is the most irritating one I have ever heard in a game. The authors probably wanted to make the atmosphere more dynamic, but all they achieved was making people turn the music off.

This is an altogether mediocre game, which might be interesting to some strategy fans, but has no chance of becoming too popular among the rest of the gaming population.