Kurzfassung

Langfassung

If there is hope, it lies in the Proletaricat.

• The pixel art is just fantastic, really high quality stuff that’s very consistent and really fits the overall feel of the game. The levels themselves are also really well designed.
• The gameplay is really tight. The controls are super simple, you move, bark and jump. That’s it. But everything is really responsive and precise, so you’ll never feel cheated or anything. It works really well and that’s what you expect from a high-quality arcade game.
• The core gameplay is fairly simple, but there’s actually a fair amount of depth to the game, especially as you progress. You bark at commuters to get them to drop whatever they’re holding (either food, vodka or a pickup). Eating food is how you earn most of your points. You can cook food by dropping a bottle of vodka on a commuter (this makes the food worth more points). The pickups are hot sauce and coffee which either let you breathe fire (hot sauce) or slow down time (coffee), they’re really handy.
• There’s two main ways to increase the point value of the food your eating. The first is to build up an air combo by catching your food mid-air. This builds up really quickly and multiplies your food points by the number of your combo, you can rack up loads of points really quickly if you can be consistent in grabbing food mid-air. You can also juggle vodka (up to ten times I believe) by barking it at to keep it in the air which then acts as a multiplier for the food you drop it on. Focusing on one or the other can be effective but you’ll see the best results if you can use them both to your advantage. You can also complete missions given to you by The Proletaricat for some extra points in Endless mode (in campaign they earn bones which are used to unlock new levels).
• There is a fair amount of food variety ranging from shawarmas (the most basic item) to fish that need to be cooked before eating. There are also bears and elk in the subway stations that you can eat by cooking them.
• Your main ‘opponent’ is really your health meter, if it drops to zero you lose, you gain it back by eating and the more points you get the hungrier you are (i.e. the faster the bar decreases). You start at zero hunger in endless, it varies for the campaign missions. Barking and jumping cause a slight jump in the bar, worth remembering. There are also some animals that will try and nick your food; Dobermans will hurry towards anything dropped on the floor, poodles will fling themselves into the air to steal your food and pigeons will pluck things right out of the sky. Bears and elk will also eat your food but this can actually be used to your advantage in the case of bears.
• It definitely has that ‘one more turn/try’ kind of feeling to it. I often found it really frustrating while I was playing it (as you would find any arcade game you’re not very good at) but I still felt compelled to try and try again to beat the level I was stuck on. The campaign levels are only a minute or two long, but I spent fifteen to twenty minutes on some of them.
• The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic and it fits really well with the game.

• The amount of mileage you get out of this game really depends on how much you like arcade or score-attack games. I like them but I’m also not their biggest fan, so it hasn’t really kept me engaged as much after the first twenty or so levels as it did during those levels. This isn’t really a bad thing, just something I wanted to mention.
• The game is made with the expectation that you’ll finish the campaign before you touch the endless mode which isn’t great since some of the things you’ll see, quite early in endless even, don’t show up until quite late in the campaign levels so you’ll have certain things show up and you won’t really know what to do with them. A little visual guide as an option which tells you what everything is would be quite helpful, but you can figure it out for yourself pretty quickly
• There are characters from a few other indie games such as VA-11 HALL-A and Lovers in a Dangerous Space Time. I love VA-11 HALL-A so I really liked being able to play as a character from it but it’s also not the kind of thing that’ll sway your opinion on the game, it’s just a nifty little extra. Worth mentioning though.

• My main issue with the game is that the difficulty of the campaign missions feels inconsistent. Several times throughout the campaign I got stumped on a level for quite a while and then the next level after that I’d be able to beat in one try. I found this inconsistently really frustrating and it made the game seem less satisfying to me.

Russian Subway Dogs is a really fun game!