Genocider On The Hunt

Review by etxbear on Sunday, May 21st 2017

Imagine an America where eugenics was such an open and serious position of the government that a genocidal plan was enacted to rid the country of its "undesirables," namely the poor and handicapped. This is the fascistic America imagined by junkmasta and depicted in their latest game, Doghunter, an admittedly fitting name for such a dark platformer, where you play as an American soldier carrying out this holocaust in, of all places, the sewers, home of the downtrodden.

This game is the second one produced by junkmasta, a newcomer on the mainsite. The first game, Birds, is a featured shooter. Seeing that I'm not very good at playing shooters, far preferring platformers to all other kinds of Sploder games, I didn't know what to expect, lacking any experience with the shooter as a frame of reference; however, seeing that both of their games have been featured gave me good hopes and I can't say I was all that let down, all anticipations (or lack thereof) considered.

You start in a closed off room floating in the air. After falling out of this room, reminding me of how soldiers, sporting parachutes, jump out of aircraft to get to a destination, you find yourself in a swampy type of place, water tiles and grass objects placed strategically to create the feeling that this setting isn't in a typically civilized location. You quickly find a tunnel that leads underground and encounter hostiles as you descend into an underworld populated by the disadvantaged among us - your victims, the prey of your hunt. You go through this eerie gutter, fighting several different kinds of enemy combatants and activating all sorts of switches in order to get from one place to the next. Ultimately, your goal is to leave this filthy location in an escape pod, but not until you're finished with your devilish mission, your slaughter as sport.

Having only one level, this game is brief, leaving little to review, but also engaging, thanks to a fantastic level design that makes you calculate your moves carefully yet hastily. There's just one objective and, like actual soldiers on real missions, you are to carry out that mission with little delay, so there is no time nor opportunity to explore places irrelevant to the task at hand, which is unfortunate for us but makes complete sense and only adds to the immersion of the player as the ~Schutzstaffel~ officer of the future, a SEAL with undeniably demonic ends. This game accomplishes much with little effort.

Pros

If it's one thing this game gets right, it's powerup placement. There's a liberal distribution of health and ammunition, but there's usually a hazard or nuisance to make one consider if they ~really~ need to get it. Sometimes, one has to, but other times one will find that it actually makes the game more fun if they skip this or that neat thing that one would otherwise get impulsively. Relatedly, there's also nice enemy placement. You're almost always fighting something, whether you're running down a corridor or trying to activate switches. There's always something trying to kill you, and you often can't avoid it. These two placements harmonize with each other quite nicely, as the latter puts one in dire enough circumstances to consider the risk of obtaining more ammunition or health (sometimes, the enemy is the risk of the powerup, adding to the harmonization). Slap on some nice scenery and block choice and you have yourself a fun, often frustrating game with a fitting aesthetic.

Cons

The one major con of this game is that it's too brief! It's only a single level in length, and although there's plenty to keep one preoccupied (albeit with inadequate variance), I feel like this game would be notably better if it had not only more levels to play and more disparity in things to do, but also a more fleshed out story, itself another problem. The story is useless, and if one were to play this game without reading the description, they wouldn't know the plot, the purpose, the whole reason you're there at all in the first place. This game is effectively a "beat up the bad guys and get out" game, which is a shame because the interesting premise of the story leaves room for more detail and dimensions.

Conclusion

Although brief, this game is fast-paced and leaves one with much to do. Set in a horrific world, you literally participate in a genocide against the most defeated and downtrodden among us, giving this game a unique story and motivation that ~hopefully~ doesn't sit well with the player. The story has too little relevance to the gameplay, which because of smart placement and design keeps you thinking and moving as you progress, not wanting to stick around too long in some places, mostly because there's no longer anything to do, of course, but sometimes also because of a present danger. Overall, this game is enjoyable to such a degree to have earned its feature, but doesn't leave you wanting to play it again. If I were to rate this game, I'd give it a safe 3 out of 5.