Way of the Dogg review for Android

Try imagining a rhythm fighting game, featuring Snoop Dogg as the kung-fu and time travel master teaching you how to fight after the beats of his music while you try to revenge your girlfriend’s death by beating the crap out of everyone involved in the case. Because it all makes perfect sense….

STORY

You are America Jones, poor guy on a mission to revenge his brutally murdered girlfriend, by following the clues and learning how to fight along the way. Your mentor, Snoop Dogg himself, is temporal martial artist and in his temple he will teach you the way of the beats.

I will stop right here since the game is story driven and I don’t want to reveal any spoilers.

The Game

Way of the Dogg has very little to do with actual fighting. You smash the beats after the rhythm while AJ fights in the background following your performance (Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo?). Controls are confusing at first, but after one or two battles you will start getting the hang of it. You follow the beats using your finger by completing series of moves and one special sliding move that shows up only if the regular moves are completed more than 50%, failing more than half of these moves will let the opponent strike you.

Battles are time based and it’s not possible to knockout your opponent before the time (song) runs out. That being said, health bars make little to no sense at all.

You will test your skill through 14 battles and 4 training stages backed up by the story related cutscenes before, after and during each one of them. Winning a battle will unlock the next one and reward you with some extra unlockable goodies that will show you the characters biography and stages info. On your first playthrough, Way of the Dogg will grant you little less than 2 hours of gameplay in total, if you decide not to skip any of the cutscenes. In other words, it’s too short.

The game makes great use of the Unity engine. Animations are smooth and graphics are cel shaded giving you the atmosphere that goes great with Snoop’s music. Battles are well scripted and entertaining, special moves and occasional in-battle events are spectacular. It’s a shame that you won’t see any of this while concentrating on the dots in front of them.

While voice acting is decent, the true power of the sound comes from the music and all the sound effect mixed in together during the fights. Speaking of music, there are only 8 songs present in the entire game, meaning most of them repeat on different stages. Why would the developers do this is beyond my knowledge. Songs are naturally bass heavy so high quality headphones or speakers are required to fully experience the game. Don’t even think of using your inbuilt speakers, it’s just wrong.

Multiplayer mode mentioned in the description of the game, is not present at all. Is the description wrong? Was the game rushed? Who knows.

Should you buy it?

Way of the Dogg is tiny little game that will most likely draw your attention only if you like playing rhythm based games. It does have reasonable replay value and hopefully the developer will add the promised multiplayer mode in the next update, but the short gameplay and amount of songs prevent me from saying, sure go ahead, you won’t regret it.

	Looks nice, sounds good		Too short
			Only eight songs

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Way of the Dogg

Developer: 505 Games Srl

Price: $0.99