Preview: Dog Duty – A Promising Real-Time Tactics Game

Dog Duty is a brand new game by developer Zanardi & Liza and publisher SOEDESCO. The game is currently in Early Access on Steam and the developers have opened the access to all players who want to jump in the game and help out the developers as the game enters its final development stages and a prepares for its final release. Dog Duty is an action game which is heavily inspired by classic real-time tactics games like Commandos and this is our preview of the game.

Dog Duty might be inspired by games like Commandoes and G.I. Joe but it brings its own flavor into the gameplay and story. Your main goal in Dog Duty is to take out the evil Octopus Commander who is hiding behind a huge fortress-like city called Capital and its ultimate defenses. Your goal here is to disable the defenses and gain access to the Capital so that you can take out the evil commander and rid the world of his filth.

To defeat Octopus Commander, you have to defeat his three powerful machines which power up the defenses of the Capital. Each of these machines is located in a heavily defended region which means that the game has three regions, each with its own unique enemy settlements and camps. Your goal is to wipe out the enemy presence from each location and take out the heavy machine in that region. Dog Duty gives you complete freedom for your approach and does not force you to pick certain missions first and the remaining ones later.

You are free to wander around and complete whichever enemy mission first. The missions are pretty straightforward as you travel to an enemy site and you take out some key targets which weaken the forces of Octopus Commander in that specific region. Each region has different sites such as Weapons Stash, POW Camps, and Outposts. Every time you take out a site, the enemy gets weaker and makes the game easier for you. You can jump directly to the boss fight but if you don’t clear out the enemy sites, enemies would be powerful, they will get reinforcements and they will make your boss fights a nightmare.

You explore the world in different powerful vehicles which are huge and you can mount turrets on them as well to make them more powerful. As you roam around, you will come across some enemy patrol and then a Mad Max type vehicular combat ensues where you can use your huge vehicle to crush the opposition or use your firepower to take them out. Other than that, you enter the enemy sites and fight the enemies on foot killing the goons, taking over weapons stashes and destroying enemy equipment.

While you are on foot, you will resort to your character abilities and their weapons to win the battles. You can use different tactics for winning the battles. While you are on your feet, you cannot simply bully your way to the finish. Your characters are not bulletproof and depending on the enemy types, they will be mowed down without an excuse. You will need to use a good balance of stealth, special items, and brute force to clear the areas. Dog Duty is a little less brutal since it allows the revival of characters if they are downed otherwise I remember that Commandos did not even allow that.

At the start of the game, you will have only one character to play with however as you complete the prologue, you end up with 3 characters each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. You can then unlock more characters from enemy POW sites as you continue to free them. By default, they come with their own weapon of choice but you can change these weapons by purchasing more weapons from shops to customize them according to your own playstyle. However, if you decide to stick with their default weapons, they are also still pretty good and you can complete missions with them easily.

Throughout the areas, you will get access to different shops which will sell you different powerful weapons for your characters. You can use the money that you gain while taking over enemy sites and camps to purchase more weapons here along with different items such as stim packs and grenades which you can use on your missions. You can also purchase different turrets for your vehicles and place them on top of them at these shops. These offer some good random encounters and makes the world of Dog Duty very alive. You can also come across some random enemy towers and encampments however you can simply drive through them to destroy them. It is really fun.

Since the game is currently in Early Access so naturally there are some problems with the game at this point. Your characters will randomly stop firing at the enemies and there is nothing that would show how much stamina your character has left. Sometimes it will keep running for longer times but in some situations, it would just start walking all of a sudden. There is quite a decent amount of visual hiccups as well where entire chunks of the screen would be covered in a black or white screen however it goes away if you open the pause menu.

The vehicle controls could be tweaked a little as well to make them more responsive to player commands. Other than these problems, the game runs great and I have been playing the game without any game-breaking bugs. These errors and bugs will be patched out until the full release of the game so I am not too worried about them at this point. The combat seems solid and each character is unique in its own way. The final version should be even better when it comes out.

Dog Duty is now available exclusively on Steam, however, the title is in Early Access. The game is in its final development stages so apart from general bug fixing, we are not expecting much more additions in the final game at this point. If you want to jump in the game and try it out yourself, simply head over to Steam and jump in the game right away to help the developers make those final adjustments to the game before the final version comes out. As for us, we are really looking forward to the full release of the game.