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CNET: Gamecenter: PC: Reviews |
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![]() Strategy & War |
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Dogs of War Rating: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 best By Cliff Hicks (8/7/2000)
The good: Pretty graphics, solid voice acting.
Check latest prices for Dogs of War at Game Shopper.
Real-time strategy games are in desperate need of saving right now. With the
exception of the occasional good title (Age of Empires II, Earth 2150),
nothing but derivative trash has come from the genre since StarCraft. We
wanted to like Dogs of War, really, but unfortunately, this dog just has to
be put to sleep.
Dogs of War tries to do a lot of things and fails to do many of them well. Beyond that, the game is fraught with bugs galore, including some that are completely unforgivable.
It's easy to overlook the actual story line; it fails to interest all but the exceptionally patient gamer who can actually listen through all of the narrator's droning. What can't be overlooked is the uncomfortable interface and glitchy play. In many ways, the interface is incredibly difficult to get used to. It's hard to control units and some of the keys do double duty, such as the Shift key, which is used to both rotate the camera and set waypoints. Unit information is small, to give a better view of the battlefield, but quite frankly, it's too small and can be hard to read at times. Even the menu interface to get into the game is awkwardly structured, with odd bullet-shaped buttons and vague icons. Buy Units is an almost worthless button, being used in less than half of the game.
The game also has more than its share of bugs. On four different machines, we encountered graphical problems ranging from textures extending to create a giant tarp over everything to effects that looked like they were just plain broken. And speaking of broken, on all four machines, we were unable to get a multiplayer game going or working. We tried for over an hour in each of the options offered to us: IPX, Internet, GameSpy...nothing worked. For some reason, all four of the computers were unable to recognize one another. So what it boiled down was no multiplayer.
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