WARDOGS is not your typical FPS. It's not just another battle royale, extraction shooter, or small-scale deathmatch waiting to join the pile of the games that came before it. This is an all-out, large-scale combined-arms warfare FPS that promises to do things a little bit differently.
If you've been yearning for someone to come along and shake up the stagnant shooter formula, then WARDOGS and its developer BULKHEAD is exactly what you've been looking for. It's a game that pits 100 players against each other across a sprawling map, offering a dynamic militaristic sandbox that unlike other shooters, literally pays you for working together with your team.
Don't believe me? Here are five ways that WARDOGS is giving the FPS genre a much-needed refresh, making it unlike any other game you've played in the genre before now.
Fight for control
WARDOGS deploys you into one of four enormous 256km² maps, where you'll fight for control of a 2x2km Control Zone. You'll be split into three teams, and whichever one has the most players within the Control Zone will earn points—requiring 100 in order to claim victory. Inside the Control Zone you have a much smaller but ever moving Hot Zone, counting you as 2 players towards your team’s player count and earning you double the cash. This dynamic objective ensures conflict across WARDOG's sprawling terrain will rarely ever play out the same between two matches.
Power to the players
WARDOGS embraces using proximity chat encouraging teamwork with strangers on your team, and even enemies every time you boot into a new match. Aside from the Control Zone - Every objective and moment is 100% player-driven— see a base on the map? That was built by players. See artillery shelling the players in it? That’s a player causing that to happen. Want to take either of them out? That's your choice. You can make a plan with friends in squad chat and then talk smack to the enemies as you execute your plan. The only limits are your creativity within the sandbox.
It's a game that completely encourages, and more importantly rewards communication and teamwork as you set out to dominate Control Zones and emerge victorious.
Cashing it in
When you first play WARDOGS , you'll start with $10,000 to build your first ever loadout. From there, every decision you make matters, as any cash you earn persists across matches. Reviving squadmates, transporting allies to the Control Zone, controlling the objective—all of these things will put cash in your pocket to optionally invest in better loadouts within the same match or saved up to spend big at a later date.
Playing, earning, and investing cash is a huge part of WARDOGS core loop, and one of the main reasons its gameplay loop is just so damn moreish. It offers similar highs and lows of the extraction genre but condensed into a respawn based gamemode, and that’s pretty neat.
Destroy, rebuild
Sometimes the quickest way to your enemies is by toppling a few buildings here and there. The architecture in WARDOGS doesn't stay intact amidst all the chaos, it reacts to it. You can tear through towns with rocket launchers, armoured tanks, and more across its dynamic map.
Or if building and fortification is more your style, you can do that too. Building bases or fortifying key locations within the map can be the exact tactical advantage your team needs in order to emerge victorious, and can be crucial for survival within and around the hotly-contested Control Zone. Whichever method you choose, you'll be able to watch the world of WARDOGS actively shift and change as a result of yours, your squad's, and your enemies' choices.
Play your way
WARDOGS isn't about stuffing you into one specific playstyle. It's all about unleashing you across its map to play however you damn please. There's no one way to dominate the Control Zone, instead offering many paths to victory.
Go for all-out destruction for the ultimate chaos, or play things a little more lowkey by grabbing a sniper, grabbing a ghillie suit and taking down your enemies from afar. Or if supporting from the sidelines is more your thing, WARDOGS makes that possible too—ferry supplies to teammates by helicopter, or assist in fortifying strategic chokepoints to keep you and your squad that little bit safer.
Flexibility is WARDOGS' bread and butter, letting you attack (or defend) however you want. It's your game after all—play it however you want.
WARDOGS is out in early access right now, available for $39.99.
