Gravhounds Early Access Review – Working Like a Dog

Dogs are loyal, hard-working, easy-to-please, and adorable little creatures, and that seems to have been enough for future corporations to turn them into a disposable workforce. That's pretty much the whole idea behind Gravhounds, the debut game from Octopus Panic, a seven-person studio whose members previously worked on series like Halo and Battlefield. It launches into Game Preview on November 2, so this isn't a finished product, and I'm judging it with that in mind. Still, there's plenty to play already, and the game's core already stands firmly on the ground.

AltChar

Loyal, obedient, and, as these tanks suggest, very easy to replace.

Story – Overtime in Another Galaxy

You play as a bio-engineered dog, basically a human body with a dog's head, stranded with your crew on the far side of the galaxy. And since you play as a dog, and dogs like to do nothing - just run around and play - this is what you might think is going to happen here, but your shipboard AI supervisor, COSMO, has a completely different idea. There are still jobs to do, so you keep dropping onto hostile planets to collect resources and salvage alien technology, hoping that it will get you home one day.

That's pretty much everything about the story you'll get for now, and for the initial hook, it's more than enough, trust me. The tone of the entire story, down to the comments while respawning after a shameful death, is designed with a huge dose of silliness. On one type of mission, you even have to escort Coffee Cat, an ally from your hub, through enemy territory, which says it all. The dogs themselves, Selene, Zane, Dozer, and Finn, are here for their abilities, so do not expect any deep backstory for any of them.

Like in many games of a similar genre, the story exists to fill an empty space and give you an excuse to go on missions, and in the case of Gravhounds, you won't get anything more than that.

Octopus Panic

Being stranded in another galaxy doesn't get you out of your shift.

Gameplay – Fetch, Build, Repeat

Every mission, or shift, as the game calls it, follows the same basic pattern. You land, set up around the Collector, gather resources, complete your objective, and try to leave alive. The longer you stay, the better the rewards, but there's a twist: the enemies get stronger, and your chances of escaping with your dog head on your shoulders drop by the minute. That's the hook, and it is a very good one, because there is always time to grab one more thing, and then, usually, things go south.

The star of the show is the Grav Beam, an industrial tool that does almost everything. You use it to mine ore, pick up what falls out and throw it into the Collector, move equipment around, place structures, and set smaller enemies flying, because why not? You can even throw items to your teammates, including health. Just be careful with volatile materials, because carrying them around can end your shift very quickly.

Building happens on the fly, mostly during fights, so you'll have to be quick and decisive. You pull pipelines out from your base node by node, and those nodes give you spots for turrets, generators, fabricators, and other structures. Pipelines also carry any resources you throw on them back towards the Collector, and they also function as grind rails. Hop on one, and you race across the map with unlimited boost, which is by far the most fun way to get around, and very handy when your base is under attack from two sides.

Octopus Panic

The further your pipeline reaches, the more of it you have to protect.

My only complaint here is that dragging out new nodes can feel imprecise. You'll want to put a node in one place, and it will end up in another, and since I played on Xbox Series X using a controller, placing them was sometimes a nightmare. Apart from that, the flow is very good and feels very natural.

Movement is great in general. The game is played from a third-person perspective, and every dog has a propulsion rig that lets you boost in any direction, jump, and hover, so getting stuck in a bad spot is almost impossible. You'll need that speed, because you start every shift quite weak. There are no loadouts here. Instead, you earn Reward Pods as you play, and each one offers a choice of weapons and upgrades.

The opening minutes can feel underwhelming, and sometimes you'll feel like quitting. I know I did. However, your turrets do a lot of the heavy lifting early on, and stacking mods soon changes things. I'm not the biggest fan of roguelikes, but watching a build come together like this is hard to resist.

Octopus Panic

The opening minutes can be humbling, and the cone of shame doesn't exactly help.

Between shifts, you spend what you've earned on new turrets, mods, weapon upgrades, and bonuses for each dog. The Mod Deck Builder also lets you decide which mods can show up, so you get some control over the randomness. Each dog has its own special ability too. Dozer digs a hole and leaves a bone bomb behind, for example, while Finn can play dead to get enemies off his back. Objectives change from one planet to the next, from defending a refinery to escorting an ally, but the basic routine stays much the same, and this is where the Early Access label shows.

Difficulty scales with the number of players, so you can play alone. It's more hectic that way, as mining, building, and defending all fall on you, and it can get tedious. I played mostly solo, and it was quite hard. Not in terms of difficulty, but because it was overwhelming with so many tasks to do on your own. Gravhounds makes the most sense with a crew, when one dog can mine while another watches the base and someone else goes off to rescue whoever wandered too far. I tried the online co-op briefly with random online players, but it is not easy to play a game with people you don't know and with a different set of players each session, so I would rather stick to solo.

Visuals and Sounds – Pink Forests and Charming Voices

Gravhounds looks good for a game from such a small team. The planets are colourful and easy to tell apart, from pink alien forests to snowy wastes and deserts, and the dog people are just odd enough to stick in your mind. The art style leans towards a cartoonish look with cel-shaded graphics, which is a perfect choice in my opinion, because more realistic graphics simply wouldn't fit the game's tone. Performance on Xbox Series X was good, which matters a lot in a game that can fill your screen with alien bugs, turrets, and explosions.

Octopus Panic

This is the kind of chaos that can bring a game to its knees, yet performance held up on Xbox Series X.

I already mentioned that the tone is mostly there for laughs, and the voice acting plays a vital role in that. COSMO's voice is particularly charming. Other sounds, including the shooting and the environmental sounds, are okay, although the shooting does sound a bit weak. Maybe that's just me, because I like guns to be loud in games.

Conclusion

Gravhounds is a strong start for Octopus Panic. The Grav Beam, the pipeline grinding, and the way building feeds into the action give it a personality of its own, and there's a proper game here behind the funny dogs. It's also clearly unfinished, as it needs more variety, some of its controls need work, and going solo can feel like more work than fun. The developers plan to spend around six months or more adding new dogs, jobs, worlds, enemies, and weapons, and they expect the price to go up along the way. If you have friends to play with, it's an easy recommendation. Everyone else can safely wait for more content.