A Time Before Wardogs
I have been playing FPS games for a long, long time. I was an avid Medal of Honor player when it was first released, logging into servers via dial-up internet on a 486 PC (those were the days, haha) and playing for hours and hours. Then came Call of Duty and the Carentan days (if you know, you know), followed by Modern Warfare's Search and Destroy, which I played competitively up until COD: MW2.
After those glory years, I started searching for a new game. I hated the direction COD had taken, and eventually came across an indie PC shooter called Modern Infantry Combat, a Half-Life 2 mod that later became Insurgency. Well, that was me hooked. The gunplay, the immersive sound, the maps... it was awesome, and I still play it to this day. I also played a lot of Battlefield, Arma, and my guilty pleasure, Tarkov (nothing quite like it). So you could say I'm very experienced when it comes to military FPS games.
So, when I saw the usual YouTubers promoting a game called Wardogs, made by British developer Bulkhead, I was immediately interested. Although it was essentially Arma KOTH, it looked very good from the early gameplay footage, and all the YouTubers were raving about it. So it must be good, right?
Wrong.
Now, I want to be clear: I am not hating on this game without reason. I fully appreciate the hard work the development team has put into it, and there is a good game in there somewhere. But what really put me off was the incessant marketing from the company and popular YouTubers, suggesting that this was the game. A game that would take us back to the glory days. A game all about gaming. A game for miserable old bastards like me, without all the clutter that envelops so many games these days. After paying my £25 or whatever it was to guarantee access to the closed beta, I came away after several hours of trying to like the game feeling very, very deflated and disappointed.
I was longing for what had been suggested through the marketing and commentary from "influencers". But, for me, this was about as far away from that promised experience as you could get. Look at this video from YouTuber Tomographic, who has almost a million subscribers and holds considerable influence over people interested in purchasing the game. He calls it a masterpiece, and I believe this was posted after just a couple of hours of the beta's release.
Now, call me cynical, but I am very sceptical about whether this was genuinely his own opinion of the game, or whether he was completely independent when it came to expressing his views. In the run-up to launch, and during the alpha and beta tests, there was hardly any critical coverage of the game. It makes me wonder whether, with all the marketing power YouTubers now hold, we have seen the end of good, independent criticism of new games.
I think this kind of coverage probably created huge expectations for me when it came to the actual Wardogs experience. But once I got past the launch problems and the huge queue (YouTubers were whitelisted) and into the actual game, things went downhill. I will say that my initial impressions were good. As most of us do, the first thing I did was head into the settings, where I was met with a host of options to customise the game to my requirements. Personally, I thought the game was far too saturated out of the box, but I had to use NVIDIA filters to adjust the saturation, as there is no in-game option (why?!). Still, I was impressed by the available options.
So, once I was in the firing range, I selected a machine gun, and the first signs of the game being a letdown started to become apparent. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I have played a lot of Insurgency, and the guns in that game are absolutely brutal. They feel heavy, dangerous, loud, and mechanical. The bullet casings drop onto the floor and interact with the environment. The guns feel worn and battered, just like me.
In fact, I can remember the first time I fired a gun in Insurgency. It put a massive smile on my face. So, I fired my machine gun in Wardogs with great expectations, yet it felt like I had just fired a low-calibre pistol. I had that familiar feeling: Here we go again. I tested some more weapons, but they all felt underpowered, weak, and almost like toys.
Where is the recoil? Where is the weight? Where are my bullet casings rolling around on the fucking floor?
That said, the helicopters were really fun to fly. I also enjoyed picking people up and transporting them to the Hot Zone.
My main gripes with Wardogs
Ok, ok, lets cut to the chase. Besides gunplay after several hours playing the game I just found it kind of pointless. Matches mainly came down to fighting over towers that had been made into FOBs (hence my earlier Fortnite comparison, although a tad unfair) and enemy encounters that seemed random which usually resulted in getting shot from behind. I really struggled to find any flow to that matches, combat direction seemed very random and spending most of the time begging to be revived only to be shot again by a sniper in a bush, became pretty tiresome. I will say this, it it was fun getting kills, shooting an enemy player who was usually looking the other way, was quite rewarding, knowing that they were going through the same monotony of suffering the same gameplay loop. But even then, kills always felt kind of lucky. I didn't feel that I was deserving of getting the kills as in the someway they do when playing something like Tarkov. I kind of just stumbled upon enemies.
The money system felt pretty gimmicky, you earn it pretty quickly and if you are just playing infantry you can afford to re buy kit and equipment very easily each round. There is no gear fear in this game. I also found the sound to be incredible bad. It's up there with Tarkov bad. I play with a good sound set-up and headphones, but I just couldn't process where sound was coming from, I found it very hard to judge distance and direction. Maybe sound is a feature than need getting used to, but for me it was pretty bad.
Conclusion
Well, it's pretty clear that this game is not for me. And, as I said earlier, I don't want to hate on the game. It's probably a fantastic experience if you're into running supplies, flying helicopters, building FOBs, and playing with a regular squad of people. But for me, the gunplay, the overall gameplay loop, and the lack of meaning in matches made me request a refund pretty quickly.
I'd happily play Wardogs in the future if the game sees some improvements. It is still in pre-release, after all, so problems are to be expected. If the gunplay is improved and more serious, infantry-led game modes are added, I would happily revisit the game and give it another look.
But it's no masterpiece. In my mind, it will never sit alongside the greats like Tarkov, Sandstorm, Squad, and Arma.
All images in this post copyright Bulkhead and came via their games Press Pack.
Views expressed are purely for critique and review and are from a personal opinion.
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