Gravhounds – Pratinjau langsung pertama dari game tembak-tembakan ekstraksi ala galaksi yang menarik dan bertema deep rock
🌐 Konten masih dalam Bahasa Inggris. Terjemahan sedang diproses.
Key Preview Takeaways:
- This PvE extraction shooter has two key differentiators: dog characters and pipelines that help automate your resource-gathering.
- The dogs neither look dog-like enough nor have distinct enough abilities for my liking.
- Give the Shiba Inu character a “bark” button, please.
Dogs. Man, dogs are awesome. Kind of dopey, loyal, (sometimes) hard-working, and they even have an uncanny ability to hear a bag of cheese opening from anywhere in the house. In developer Octopus Panic’s upcoming Gravhounds, corporations have taken advantage of those beloved traits – well, at least the loyal and hard-working parts, anyway – and created genetic hybrids of man and man’s friend to fashion the ideal worker. Over the past weekend, an open playtest gave players their first taste before launching into its planned early access release later this fall. I suited up and hopped in to see how much bite this dog has.
In Gravhounds, you and up to three others team up to complete missions and gather resources before blasting off to the safety of your ship in orbit. The longer you spend on the planet’s surface, the bigger and tougher the waves of enemies coming at you become, making the whole excursion a satisfying sort of “push your luck” PVE affair. Do you stick around trying to find some rare resources, or do you bounce the first chance you get? Some reward is better than no reward, after all.
Each player assumes the role of a Gravhound - a human/canine hybrid - four of which were possible to pick from during the playtest. These included Zane the Doberman, Finn the Shiba Inu, Selene the Weimaraner, and Dozer the Bulldog. Each has slightly different stats and a special move that helps to differentiate them from one another. As you complete missions, you can upgrade and teach the dogs new tricks by improving their stats and unlocking a surprising amount of tech and defensive turret upgrades across different skill trees.
For fans of other similar sorts of games, Deep Rock Galactic comes to mind. Gravhounds has a much greater focus on movement and fast-paced traversal when compared to its peers. Boosting and dashing will be your main method of navigating the alien worlds, while shooting and blasting waves of enemies that are trying to break your stuff and wreck your collector, your one ticket off the planet. Each of the planets contains different resources and mining nodes that you will have to use your grab gun / gravity device on to deliver back to your ship. Running back and forth is a bit of an annoying task, or at least it would be, if it weren’t for perhaps my favorite little twist that Gravhounds introduces - the pipeline.
Spreading outward from the collector ship is a network of pipes that you and your team will be able to expand as you see fit. Composed of segments, each portion is capped by a node, with additional parts being able to be dragged outward from any of these nodes. By simply tossing resources onto the pipe, they automatically get towed toward the ship, making them as good as gathered. At each node, you can also build powerful turrets and other structures to help with collection or fend off incoming hordes. There were times my team and I made basically a kill box of turrets that would just chew through anyone that came close while having a dedicated delivery line to collect the resources. Coming up with the wildest paths is almost a game itself, but as I mentioned before, fast movement is a core component of Gravhounds, and these pipes are a large factor as well, as they can also be grinded along, allowing you to quickly get around the map when you need to, or back to the ship once the mission is complete. Once the launch countdown starts, you only have 30 seconds to get back, otherwise you’ll be left behind!
As you kill enemies and complete objectives, you will fill a bar that, once maxed out, will allow you to call down a special reward pod, giving matches of Gravhounds a bit of a roguelike feeling. Each of these pods will come with three possible mods to pick from, pulled from the pool that you’ve unlocked from your research lab. Some of the combinations that can result in some pretty satisfying builds, with my personal favorite being the combo of a gravity ball that sucks enemies into the sky and rockets that home in on enemies - both of which would trigger when I scored a critical hit. Shooting did lack a bit of punch, and enemies had a bit of that damage-sponge feel to them, especially the tougher ones, so hopefully it does get tweaked a bit before release. That said, there is still enough here to have a good time with.
The crew at Octopus Panic has opted for a stylized, whimsical aesthetic for Gravhounds, with the planets and environments taking on a slightly cartoon-y but not overly so look to them. Looking at the hounds themselves, the team drew inspiration from Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” music video that was released back in the mid-90s, with the bodies looking completely human and only the heads showcasing the dog side of these creatures. The dog heads are a bit more stylized than, say, those used in the new Star Fox that released earlier this year, but seem more realistic than the look of the rest of the game, but largely do a good job capturing the look of the breed they are representing. The whole time, though, the fact that they are, in essence, just dog heads stuck on a normal body, I just kept thinking of those videos that went viral back in the 2010s where people put suits on dogs, stuck their heads through the collars while they used human hands to feed them things like peanut butter. I wish that there were at least tails sticking out of their space overalls and jumpers, just to give a bit more of a sense that they are also part dogs, and not just people wearing masks.
The prevailing thought that kept coming to mind was this strange notion I can only really describe as a “fun imbalance.” Gravhounds, even in this early open playtest, presented folks who dropped in with a surprising amount of choice to pick from, but how exciting or fun it was to make those choices could swing so wildly from “OH HELL YES!” to “hmm, I guess…” when making them.
For instance, look at the mods that can spawn from the reward pods that you earn during a mission. These roguelike canisters let you improve your hound and offer three options. Choices like the previously mentioned “Rocket Barrage” were always awesome to get. On the flip side, you could get ones that increase your magazine size or a one-time heal. Sure, they help, but not quite what I would call exciting to pick, or “fun.”
When it comes to the upgrade trees themselves for your gun, the mods, and turrets, they all use the same research tokens as required components. Again, each time I used the unique tokens, I unlocked things like new Rocket Turrets or improved my barrage mod, which I was excited to unlock and upgrade, while something like increasing the fire rate on my rifle from 1.0x to 1.06x just felt bland and underwhelming. And at least in this playtest, there was no way to refund and respec those tokens, and earning them is a grind, with the only way to get them seemingly be by completing “milestones”. Arbitrary goals within matches, such as collecting X amount of credits, killing X amount of creatures, etc. I want what is on offer to be somewhat on par with one another in terms of feeling meaningful or interesting to pick from. Training your Gravhound crew manages to avoid a similar pitfall thanks to it using a different resource, earned from gaining levels with that specific character, and the whole thing feels more balanced and rewarding. Perhaps adopting a similar approach and separating the requirements a bit more may help.
The experience of playing the various Gravhounds similarly feels like a mixed bag of milkbones, with some having far more interesting (and useful) unique traits compared to others. By far, Dozer and Zane were my favorites during the playtest from an ability standpoint, and could help out any team I was on. Dozer could lay adorable bone-shaped mines, and Zane could use his bark to push back incoming enemies. Seeing a wave of bugs run straight into a squad of Dozer’s minefields and explode was awesome, and jumping in as Zane to push them back as the turrets and my teammates laid into them felt badass. It crushed me, as someone who has a Shiba Inu overlord (a 13-year-old Shiba matriarch named Tsuki), that Finn’s skill just has him fall on the ground and play dead. I still would take damage, and while enemies appeared to pass me by, I have no clue how this could be used to benefit my team in a cooperative game like Gravhounds. Maybe so they wouldn’t have to try rescuing me? Again, this all boils down to this strange imbalance of experience and exciting choices that Gravhounds offers, and I’m hoping that since this is still in active development, this will be less of a concern by the time it releases.
After exploring its worlds and systems a bit during this initial playtest, Gravhounds has left a strong enough impression on me that I’m intrigued to come back and give it a try when it enters early access. Grinding on pipes and collecting resources is a good enough time that I could see myself having some fun during the occasional game night with friends, or mindlessly grinding some levels solo offline. That said, though, there are certainly aspects to it that I hope get refined a bit before launch, such as balancing out the “fun” of the choices you get, and I wouldn’t mind some tweaks to the dogs themselves. Having a Shiba, the idea of them “playing dead” while strangers walk by instead of barking its head off or doing the breed’s signature “Shiba scream” is almost as fantastical as The Lord of the Rings. I’d love to see more of a dog personality come through in general. Give me a “bark” button, let me change the coloring of my gravhound, just something to make it not just come off as someone in a dog mask. There’s a good dog here; it just has some matted fur that could be brushed out before release.
While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!
Sumber: IGN PC Articles