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Strategy & War


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. 
The bad: Glitchy gameplay, awkward interface, broken multiplayer, overly high difficulty. 
The bottom line: With unwieldy gameplay and a variety of bugs, Dogs of War isn't worthy of being in the same genre as Ground Control. 
Multiplayer: Up to eight players  
ESRB rating: T (Teen)

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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.

Screen shots:  1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10
The story behind Dogs of War is standard RTS fare: The Imperial Order controls the galaxy; a bunch of rebels called WarMonkeys are fighting the Order in a border war; and there's a group of aliens, called the Mantai, that flubs everything up for everyone. To counter the lackluster story, however, some of the voices are supplied by Craig Charles, who's best known for his role as Lister on Red Dwarf. Charles adds a lot to the game, as he seems to naturally slide into the part and gives the game a well-needed shot of character. The soundtrack by Fatboy Slim helps keep gamers focused too, adding flavor to the game. Dogs of War's graphics are pretty to look at, but not stellar, which seems to be a metaphor for the whole game.

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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Dogs of War




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