Dogs of War Preview

Primus is the primary source of SL18, a radioactive alloy that is incredibly strong. It is also the main salable item of an intergalactic empire whose capital is Earth. When the flow of SL18 is interrupted, the imperial order sends in the troops to reclaim the flow of the product. The only trouble is there is a renegade force, known as the warmonkeys, prohibiting that flow.

Dogs of War plays out like games in the war/civ genre.  The commands are basically the same. Combine units, send orders, issue patrol designations and conquer the enemy units with either massive firepower, sniper attacks or carefully calculated troop deployment - the choices are in your hands. However, as in most real-time strategy products, the key to success does lie in using your brain, not just the firepower of your units.

From the moment you launch this program, you will be struck by its similarities to Age of Empires, Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun and Alpha Centauri. This game incorporates elements of all three. There are similarities to the controls employed by those games - the group units command, the single unit selection and the point-and-click deployment. Having played those other programs made the controls for Dogs of War extremely easy to grasp.

And while Alpha Centauri employs a lot of planet biology, Dogs of War adds one element that is mildly interesting and infinitely annoying to your forces - the mantai. These creatures look like a large mutated combination of lizards and turtles. They are carnivores who dine indiscriminately on whatever prey presents itself.

You can take on the role of either the Imperial forces or the warmonkeys, the renegades who have disrupted the flow of SL18 and are intent on breaking away completely from the control exerted by the imperium. The program is rife with cliches, most of those coming within the game as vocal commands. Even the primary mission undertaken as a warmonkey is entitled ‘Creek No Paddle’ (as in: up a creek with no paddle).

Your main game control interface is the GUI, a display that runs across the bottom of the screen and gives you access to a variety of elements, such as the map overview, unit selection, health and reload capabilities, and the in-game features such as pause and stop.

The sound quality of Dogs of War is quite good. The narrator speaks with an English accent, and will guide you through a less-than-challenging tutorial to acquaint you with the controls. Graphically the game is average. The initial perspective is god-mode, or the clouds (if you prefer), but the cameras can move about and give you a zoom version - to a certain degree, nothing too close - to reveal the polygonal characters. The world is rendered in three dimensions, but aside from gullies, mountains and a lot of rocky features, lacks any really interesting details. This is a planet that requires space suits to live on, and is mostly uninhabitable.

Game play is seamless from mission start to end. The game does have a nice flow.

Overall, Dogs of War lacks freshness. This program trots out the theme of a little foe against a big opponent, settles it on a distant planet, then gives the same game fixtures as popular war/civ-genre games. It will provide challenges, but definitely does not have the stunning visual quality of the aforementioned programs. In its own right, Dogs of War is a good program, just not unique enough to stand out in the crowd.