Dou Review

Marginally more expensive than the average no-achievement game on the Xbox Store at £1.69, Dou (aka Dou Go! Run! Jump!) is probably the leanest of the bunch. It’s wafer thin, dissolving away into nothingness before it even hits your tongue. 

In Dou you play a little blob called FooFoo that could be mistaken for a Goomba. It’s aim is to reach the end of a level, literally marked ‘Goal’ on a signpost. This is achieved by hopping over obstacles and onto platforms in a typical 2D platforming manner. You can move, jump and dash (pulled off by holding RT), and that dash can give you extra lift on your jumps.

The dash is an oddball. We found that Dou is immeasurably improved by continuously holding it down. You have greater control over your Goomba, your jumps go farther, and Dou gets a cool Sub Zero-like glaze over his eyes. We wondered why it wasn’t the default. It would have saved us a bit of carpal tunnel.

The levels are not complicated. The cynical reviewer inside of us would say that they are borderline identical. As the levels progress, and there are thirty-two of them, they get more difficult by pushing the platforms slightly further away from each other, and thinning the platforms that you do land on. Some spinning blades attempt to mix things up roughly a third of the way in.

Dou doesn’t have an enlightened approach to level design. It’s idea of challenge is to put platforms so far apart that you have no margin for error. There’s no strategy, exploration, collectibles, or even sequences of jumps that you get to pull off with panache. This is a long-jump simulator, and you have to tap the jump button at the last possible moment. It’s a precision platformer as a kind of driving test: you are scored on how precise you jump, but it has absolutely no charm or ideas beyond that. 

Death will happen regularly, which isn’t too much of a headache as the levels are extremely short. Most are done in under thirty seconds. We’d have taken a different approach to the music, though: it restarts after every death, and when you’re plummeting every ten seconds, it can feel like a needle is skipping on some vinyl.

Dou would have been marginally improved with features beyond the ones it has. Global highscores would have given us something approaching motivation. Instead, it offers a three stars system, which does a job – not that we ever saw much beyond two stars on a level.

We are struggling to come up with something redeemable about Dou, something that will justify the £1.69, outside of being able to make the main character’s eyes light up as you tap RT. It’s mercifully short, of course, and there is nothing particularly off-kilter about the controls. FooFoo does everything you tell it to. We will plump for the visuals, which have a certain Gameboy charm. You can squint and imagine you rented it from Blockbuster Video.

There’s no argument for spending £1.69 on Dou. You can’t even point to some easy achievements, as it has none. It’s a clinical, charmless little platformer that pokes you in the ribs and demands that you make pixel-perfect jumps without any feeling of reward for doing so. It might argue that expectations should be low for the price, but it can go Dou one.

You can buy Dou from the Xbox Store for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S