Dog Duty

Review

Your three-man squad was sent to Octopia to eliminate the evil leader known as Commander Octopus; a nutcase who wears a deep-sea diving helmet with tentacles all around it, and who is ready to jeopardize world peace by sending his huge Octo-army to conquer the world! The mission was on track until the Octo-army intercepted a fast-moving beep heading towards Octopia on their radar. Octopus Commander ordered a ground-to-air missile fire, which struck the tail of the helicopter that was carrying your squad members. Thankfully, they managed to crash land the chopper, but the squad was taken prisoner by the enemy force soon after. Don’t worry; we have a cunning escape plan to get them out of there and complete their mission. Dog Duty out!

Dog Duty is a real-time tactical top-down action game developed by Zanardi and Liza and published by SOEDESCO Publishing on the 13^th of August 2019 on the Steam platform as an Early Access. Dog Duty will also be available on Nintendo Switch, PS4 and Xbox One sometime in spring 2020!

The game consists of 4 maps:  Swamp, Desert, River and the main Octopus Commander Base, which is located in the middle of the other three areas. After escaping the prisoner camp on a truck with your three members, you’ll arrive in the section where the Octopus commander base is located. You’ll have a brief chit chat with him and will politely ask to leave the doorstep of his fortified compound.

From here, you’ll have to explore the other three areas and take over a weapon and armour depot, two outposts, a prisoner camp and a base station in each of these areas. You must defeat all three mini-bosses, found in each of the base stations, before having a go at the Octopus Commander lair.

In the desert you’ll be travelling on a truck, in the swamp you’ll be on a Hovercraft, and on the river you’ll have a boat. As you explore each of these three areas on your vehicles, you’ll come across enemy patrols between the bases you have to take over. You can decide to fight them and get a reward (money) by defeating them or just move on until you find one of the six bases you have to take over in each of the areas. I forgot to mention that there is a shop at the start of each new area where you can buy new weapons and turrets to place on each of your vehicles, but of course you need to have money to buy these things.

There will be tasks to complete when your team arrives to take over one of the enemy structures. All the bases have one or more radars to destroy; for some you will need to check out ammunition boxes, destroy a certain number of boats (river map), cars (desert map) or hovercrafts (swamp map) as well as eliminate all enemy military personnel. Try to get to the Radars first and as fast as possible to stop having to deal with reinforcement. In the prisoner camp, you’ll have to free one hostage as part of the task and he/she will become an additional/reserve member of your squad.

It is a fun little game with some light humour, but I find it not very challenging in the first part which includes all three mini-bosses, but then super hard in the Octopus Commander base.

In terms of the characters, there are eight in total; your first three when you escape the prisoner camp at the start of the game, and the other five that you’ll need to find within Octopia. So far, I’ve managed to find another three characters in my gameplay. Each of the characters has their own skill, so learn how to use them effectively. Bear in mind that when you use a character skill, it will take some time to regenerate before you can re-use it, and so on and so forth.

The game will auto-save each time you take over or revisit a one of your structures (bases), and I really like that. There are a few bugs to rectify asap: the map works on and off, your vehicle gets stuck within the scenery for a while, and there doesn’t seem to be too much balance in terms of difficulty progression.

Nice graphics, fun soundtrack and I find the control responsive (mouse and keyboard). I did enjoy my gameplay, but the issue I mentioned above has heavily influenced my scoring.