Wild Dogs is Retro with a capital R. It immediately sets its stall out with a Nintendo Gameboy colour palette and a cracking MIDI soundtrack. Then it jumps straight into some run-and-gunning that Metal Slug would be happy to put its name to.
Wild Dogs wasn’t a game that we necessarily had high hopes for. We get more than enough shoot ’em ups, run-and-gunners and pixel art games on the Xbox, and there wasn’t anything in the screenshots that made us believe we were in for something special. The dog in the screenshots couldn’t distract us: Wild Dogs looked bound for the bin marked ‘generic’.
Except it isn’t generic – far from it. Wild Dogs is one of those joyful surprises where we judged the book entirely by its cover and then got lost in the adventure that followed. If you like Metal Slug, Mega Man, Contra or similar classics of the genre, then Wild Dogs has a decent stab at joining them.
A quick caveat before we start: Wild Dogs doesn’t have many dogs in it. It might tempt you in with the possibility of petting the dog (spoiler: you can), and the dog does accompany you throughout the game, but Wild Dogs finds precious little for the dog to do. It might be in the title and your constant sidekick, but the dog is little more than a bit of eye candy.
Instead you play Frank, an ex-marine who is either wearing a balaclava or has shed most of his facial features (the Gameboy graphics doesn’t allow much in the way of detail). Instead of enjoying his retirement with his dog, Teddy, he’s been dragged into fighting an alien invasion. The military did eff all, and now it’s Frank’s turn to stomp the alien threat.
This is the excuse for some reasonably traditional run-and-gunning. Frank can be moved around with the left-stick, but can be locked in place with RT, at which point he aims 360 degrees around himself. The trade-off is immediately obvious: you can have maneuverability with the free fire, or you can have accuracy at the expense of being a sitting duck. It’s a classic control system for this kind of game.
As with any game with this system, it’s got its flaws. When using free fire, you’re locked to firing in the cardinal directions and the diagonals, which isn’t quite enough precision to pick off certain enemies. You’re also capable of only firing in the direction you’re facing, which means that retreating leaves you open. Firing with RT removes most of these problems, of course, but it also leaves you ridiculously vulnerable to the enemies of the game, who have rapid-fire buttons of their own. You will want to be using it rarely.
The thing is, we’re used to the system and its downsides. Plus Wild Dogs knows it has a blind spot so over-compensates for it. It achieves it through its power-ups, which are so ridiculously overpowered that not having them feels utterly terrible.
We jealously held onto the best ones. There’s a homing missile which is almost unbeatable. Holding onto the fire button, it searches out enemies even before they’ve entered the screen. It feels like a ‘win’ button, and we had no guilt about jamming our finger into it. Other weapons are as fun and pyrotechnic, but not quite as dominating: a split-bullet and a boomerang tend to make quick work of the enemies.
They have a downside, in that losing the best ones (including accidentally overwriting them with something rubbish, like the flamethrower) can make the difference between a successful or failed run. We died at difficult bosses, reverted to the default gun, and found things roughly eighty times harder. There may well be too large a gap between the best and worst weapons.
Not that Wild Dogs is particularly difficult. It sorely needs difficulty options and the ability to increase or decrease the number of lives/continues, but its one degree of challenge is set reasonably low. While we didn’t make it to the end of Wild Dogs’ surprisingly long runtime on our first go, we got far farther than we expected. Then we could return to the last level we reached, lives and continues replenished, to give it another go.
It’s these levels that make Wild Dogs such a sleeper hit, because it’s got attention deficit. Traditional run-and-gun missions will be followed by sudden forays into helicopters and mechs (one of the few times you use the dog). Combat missions segue into non-combat missions. Best of all, minibosses are chucked out at a faster rate than the levels themselves, and they’re superb. Each one could be an end-of-level boss by themselves, such is the level of imagination, challenge and number of phases. Yet we get three of them per level, leading to a screen-filling villain at the end. Learning them all, mastering the independent phases, was never less than thrilling.
For a budget shooter, Wild Dogs leaves nothing behind. Its five levels are huge, and each of those five contains four bosses. Each boss is a multi-staged bugger who just will not drop. And between those bosses are levels that never sit still. The designers have clearly come to each level with the determination to test the player on something new. And you just don’t see that approach often in a budget shooter.
We couldn’t have been happier to be proven wrong. Wild Dogs may not look like much, and the screenshots make it look like a generic shooter with nostalgia goggles on, but it’s ace. In the bosses and the freewheeling levels, it finds a way to elevate the competent shooting into full-on recommendation. Every Mega Man (and their dog) should give it a whirl.
