Barking up the right tree
I am not a great long term, tactical thinker when it comes to games. I tend to react to what is happening in the moment, maybe thinking one or two steps ahead, but not ten or twelve. I gravitate towards games that encourage this kind of improvisational thinking. This kind of attitude does me pretty well. I have fun, and I get to marvel at friends who can do that kind of planning a lot better than me.
Despite this gap in my game playing ability, I still have a go at games that reward that kind of play. I even enjoy a turn-based computer game from time to time. I’ve bounced off various versions of X-Com, loved Into the Breach, and have recently been playing a new entry in this genre called Dog in the Machine, which I have found delightful. Dog in the Machine is designed by Studio Chahut and published by Goblinz Publishing. The latter also published Shogun Showdown, another turn-based computer game that I honestly still revisit from time to time.
I was sent a copy of Dog in the Machine for a review by a PR company working on behalf of the publisher.
The premise is simple. You play an autodog, a robotic and sentient pet destined for the scrap heap. A disembodied voice wakes you up and urges you to escape, using the various abilities that you have. This starts your journey through a series of combats, encounters with the strange robots that inhabit the city, all in the aid of gathering evidence as to where all the humans have gone. Mechanically this sees you travelling through three sectors, with combats and opportunities to upgrade and alter your abilities, all while trying to keep an eye on the alarm level as it threatens to increase and end your fun times.
Each combat plays out on an isometric grid full of enemies and obstacles. Each turn you will play attacks and tricks by spending the energy you get at the start of each turn. Attacks allow you to inflict damage and throw enemies around the arena. Tricks mostly augment attacks, allow you to move around in clever ways, and inflict conditions on your enemies that smooth your path to victory. Each one costs a certain amount of energy, as does moving around.
You can pilot a variety of different dogs with variable starting setups, but the main two types are Wreckers and Shovers. Wrecker dogs mostly brute force enemies, destroying them with direct damage and pushing into obstacles and other enemies. Shover types have to study the battlefield more, sending enemies careening into each other, explosive boxes, and travelators that hurl them around the map. I found the throwing type a little harder to get a handle on at first, but they are definitely fun once you do: setting up chains of collisions is incredibly satisfying.
To give you a hand in planning your turns the designers have given you a couple of clever tools. You can plan out your entire turn, watch what happens, then completely, or partially, undo it. Nothing is confirmed until you say it is. Planning then undoing your turn over and over could get a bit irritating, so to alleviate this you have 3 separate planning tracks. This allows you to try big, bold ideas safe in the knowledge you can switch between trains of thought with ease. You might plan in such a way that your dog is defeated, ending your run! Doesn’t matter until you hit go. Time is a mutable resource.
When enemies take damage they might have their own reactions potentially moving or/and firing off an attack. This can of course be used to your advantage, allowing you to position enemies to attack each other while you dance around the battlefield with grace. As you do you get to pick up little bits of health, energy, and other bonuses but also bump into new spawns. Enemies come in a box, spawning like this in one turn and then revealing what they are in the next. These boxes can of course be attacked and shoved around like anything else, and enemies emerging from them take the damage and status inflicted on the box. A new avenue for controlling the battlefield emerges.
Taking damage isn’t the only way to lose the run. During each combat, various enemies will have an alarm above their heads on a given turn. Every damage the enemy takes, reduces this amount by one. At the end of a turn any remaining alarm present on enemies gets added to a track that only gets reset at the end of the sector. With each sector having 3 fights this can build up, and if it reaches max it is game over. You have a built in ability to block a bit of alarm increase as one of your basic abilities. These also cover a basic move and attack. However each time you use the alarm suppression or attack, they get more expensive to use, meaning they are a scarce resource begging to be used wisely.
The increasing alarm level means your focus has to shift around the battlefield. You might want to go hard at the enemy in front of you, finishing it off for good. However, over the other side of the map is a group of enemies all of whom are threatening to raise the alarm. You have to pivot, conscious of the fact that any enemy left alive at the end of a turn could be a source of alarm in the next turn. As the combat goes on, the individual alarm levels increase, putting a frisson of efficiency puzzle in the mix to further complicate your decisions.
The tactical puzzle that Dog in the Machine presents is fun and satisfying. For me the secret sauce of the game that elevates it above others in the genre, is the ability to make your own attacks. As you journey through the sectors you get Mecha Bones. These are spent to get you permanent upgrades, called chipsets, that alter the base rules of the game. You can also spend them at the Training Station to mutate the various attacks you have with the tricks you have picked up along the way. You may only have 5 attack and 6 trick slots, but you can store some in your backup memory allowing you to not only swap tools out as you need them, but augment your attacks with tricks you aren’t even actively using!
The NAME allows you to combine an attack with any trick you have access to, but usually doesn’t increase the energy cost of the attack. This opens up a whole world of possibilities and really gives you a tool box to build whatever you can imagine. I had great fun creating abilities, managing to create attacks where I could pull enemies to me, attack, and then send them skeetering across the map colliding into other enemies and setting chain reactions up. This ability to create feels very freeing, giving you an artistic outlet bounded by the restrictions of a turn based tactical game.
There is a narrative that emerges over the course of the game of a human resistance outside the city, fighting against an AI uprising. While this is a very relevant tale for our times, it doesn’t feel very well developed. I ran out of story from the main ‘robot’ that gives it out very quickly. As you complete runs you build up a resource called Nexus points. The implication is that this unlocks harder bosses, and allows you to go up against the AI bosses that have made all this happen. There is maybe some more story there, but I haven’t played enough yet to unlock this part of the game. I feel like the narrative should have either been even more lip service or fully developed. Here it is an uncomfortable middle ground
I have really enjoyed my time with Dog in the Machine. The art style, is colourful and appealing, being slightly cartoonish but not childish. The way the designers have laid out arenas and created tooltips, makes it very easy to parse the battlefield. The combination of the generous planning tracks and rewind tools, makes turns feel creative and stress free. What I’ve enjoyed most though is making up my own powers, combining tricks and attacks to make fun abilities. It feels like a bit of deckbuilding, a genre I love both digitally and in its physical form. I hope you’ll take the time to check out Dog in the Machine and find, as I have, that they are all good dogs.
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