If we’ve learned nothing else from our collective adventures in co-op gaming over the years, we at least learned this much: simple objectives plus mounting pressure equals good times. It’s a principle that holds firm whether you have Left 4 Dead, Deep Rock Galactic or Helldivers 2 under the microscope, and with Octopus Panic, Inc.’s debut release, the studio demonstrates some real expertise with that formula.
It’s like this: you’re blue-collar dogs in space. It’s your job to drop into planets, harvest their resources while fending off the local hostile fauna, and then bug out of there with your earnings. Spend your resources on persistent upgrades and better gear, drop back in to more challenging planets, rinse, repeat.
It’s possible to play Gravhounds as a singleplayer game, but it’s got a co-op heart. The minutiae of its missions are really built around breaking it up into smaller tasks and delegating those tasks to up to four players, so you’re working a sort of assembly line of extraplanetary mining materials. It would be extremely lazy journalism to make an easy comparison like ‘it’s Deep Rock Galactic except someone left the lights on’, so, of course, I won’t.
Each mission begins with a brief setup phase. You choose where to place the fabricator that lets you build additional items, and lay out a network of nodes. You can put turrets, teleporters, generators and other items on these nodes according to the mission’s requirements. Inevitably, you wind up building a lot of turrets.
And then it’s out to mine or harvest a specific resource type. Locate it, use your mining laser to break it down into usable form, then transport it back to your base ship and fire it in through the window. As you do this, waves of enemies appear and periodically attempt to mess your day up by attacking your turrets, fabricators, and soft tissue.
This is where the co-op appeal really lies, because it’s far more efficient for players to focus on a single stage each of that process, than to have one person doing the resource gathering while the others just shoot enemies. A well-drilled team might have one player quarterbacking the whole mission by using Sentry View to identify where the next wave’s coming from and staying back at base to repair and upgrade turrets, while the others have clearly defined roles that keep the resources coming while the alien critters flood forth. One laser miner, one resource courier, one bodyguard.
You’ve got to give credit to a game that so quickly instills a sense of professional pride. Your contributions might not always show up numerically on the postgame screen, but you know you couriered those nitrate clusters back to base like pro, dammit, and you’ve got every right to puff your chest out.
It also helps that so many actions in Gravhounds feel intrinsically pleasing. Example: You bringing resources back to base by picking them up with your mining laser and then firing them into the ship. What elevates this is that you’ve got incredible range, so you can absolutely pelt objects from the other end of the map, if you’re precise enough. Like so many elements of Gravhounds there’s a nice risk-reward to it. Get the shot right and you feel like Kobe, but if your aim’s off you’ll hit the ship’s exterior and the resource will explode on impact.
Sliding and hovering around the environment with your enhanced abilities feels great in the hands too, even if the animations depicting it are slightly suspect. As lone wolf archetype Selene, my special ability is to hurl a frisbee into the sky and catch it mid air, effectively giving myself a teleport ability that gets me out of danger. It feels so good to throw that frisbee and launch into the sky in pursuit of it. It’s not easy to make simple actions like this feel so satisfying.
Combat feels a little less nuanced than the resource-gathering element, but there’s still enough depth for you to feel some gratification about your turret placement and the way you combine weapons, grenades and abilities as a team. There’s no difficulty setting here, just missions with different inherent difficulty ratings. That means even in the earliest missions, the size and DPS of the enemy waves you face is pretty formidable. There’s no shame in being downed a few times in any mission. At least, I hope not. (I’m also a huge fan of the fact you respawn with a cone collar as though you’re fresh out of the vets, great touch Octopus Panic, 10/10.)
This might be a new studio and a debut game on paper, but there’s a lot of experience at work here and it shows. The studio has veterans from the Halo, Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront games, and in that context I’m not surprised by how mechanically satisfying this is, right out of the gates in Early Access. Even the reward drops feel great – levelling up mid-game means ushering down a big crate, which has a damage radius. So you toss out a flare, aim it at a tightly packed mob of enemies, and feel like a genius when it lands on them for damage.
Whether this is going to pull the deeply entrenched dwarves away from Deep Rock Galactic of the grimdark devotees out of Darktide, though, probably has less to do with pleasing mechanics and more to do with thematic and visual appeal. This is, after all, a game about dogs with guns mining in space. Its visual design cues conjure Revenge of the Savage Planet far more than those more severe, hardcore titles, and perhaps intentionally skew towards a younger audience for whom yellow alien blood is more appropriate. Personally I found it a tough sell to get my usual co-op buddies interested in the dog space game regardless of its virtues.
There’s already a lot of content here in terms of missions and planets, and the devs plan to include “more more Gravhounds, jobs, worlds, enemies, weapons, upgrades, and progression” during its time in Early Access. So, more of everything then. That means there’s a lot of potential to these pooches. Easily enough to warrant a few evenings experimenting with its physics-based abilities, chucking items to each other and playing fetch. If you’re looking for a co-op action builder that’s big on whimsy, Gravhounds should be on your radar.
