There are absolutely demanding gauntlets requiring precise inputs. Also, there are a lot of spikes.īut very quickly, Grapple Dog gets much more demanding than its innocent facade would lead you to believe. Items are scattered about to collect, some of them hidden behind secret walls or spaces. Each world has a theme and distinctive mechanic added, meaning you’re constantly learning and growing as a player. Only certain sorts of blocks, which are easily identifiable, can be hooked onto. To defeat enemies, you bounce off of them or grab them with your grappling hook.
One dog story switch review trial#
Levels are about the right length, with optional Time Trial options for each one. It is up to players to get through the game’s 33 levels to save the day.Īll of the classic platformer hallmarks are present in Grapple Dog. When he falls behind, he ends up both acquiring a legendary grappling hook and unleashing a horde of robots set on acquiring those inventions for their own purposes. Pablo is a research assistant on an expedition. However, enemies rose up, forcing those treasures to be hidden away. Grapple Dog is set in a world where a great inventor, a mouse who seems to resemble Steve Jobs, created some revolutionary items. However, not well enough that it become the highlight of the title. The good news is it mostly handles the concept well.
Enter Grapple Dog, a platformer in which one of the key components is getting around with a grappling hook. If you’re a platformer freak like I am it’s definitely worth a look, but there’s not much here to put it above some of the great examples of the genre on Switch.There are certain sorts of mechanics and gameplay concepts that can be fun, but need to be done right or a game suffers. It’s an enjoyable game, but it doesn’t do any one thing exceptionally well. Grapple Dog has some neat ideas, and it keeps them coming throughout the campaign so it continues to mix things up along the way, but it doesn’t really stand out in a major way. The unlockable bonus levels provide a different kind of frustration, as they often showcase the limitations on the game’s controls due to the level of precision they require. Levels will often include branching paths, where one way houses a collectible and the other is the path forward, but the game has a bad habit of not making it clear which way is which and then preventing you from backtracking once you realize you missed something. While the many collectibles provide replay value, some of that can be frustrating. There are also medals available for playing each level in time trial mode, and tokens for bonus stages in many of the levels. or the flowers in Yoshi’s Island, and then another two available for collecting oranges, of which there are 250 per level, but thankfully only 220 are required to get the gems. There are five of them hidden throughout the level, like the star coins in New Super Mario Bros. And before you ask, you CAN pet the dog when you complete a level.Īpart from ringing the bell to end the level, the goal in each stage is to collect purple gems. The story is your basic “save the world from ancient evil" and the dialogue is cute but there’s more of it than there needs to be. Grapple Dog features nice 2D sprite art and a pleasant but unmemorable soundtrack. Most of the time this isn’t an issue, but for a platformer of this type it’s really annoying when the controls feel off. It’s too easy to slide off a platform or into an enemy after you've landed on it, and since you can only aim the grappling hook straight up or at a 45 degree angle, there are times when it feels like you should be able to hook onto something but miss. The biggest problem with Grapple Dog is the controls don’t always feel precise enough for what the game is asking you to do. Along the way it does a really good job of keeping things fresh by introducing new kinds of enemies and blocks that make you approach levels in different ways. Only certain surfaces, highlighted in blue, can be grappled, which prevents it from feeling overpowered, so traditional run and jump platforming also plays a big part in the level design. As the title would indicate, the grappling hook mechanic is the central premise of the game, and it’s used in a variety of ways.
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