Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines Review

I quite enjoyed Grapple Dog a few years back, with its great mix of retro styling and more modern challenge and design. Now, Pablo is back, and he’s not alone. Bringing in Luna offers a different style of gameplay, and combined with a more fluid feeling traversal and movement system makes Cosmic Canines a more enjoyable game all round.

Pablo is drawn into multi-universe drama as an ancient evil known as Vyr returns, looking to dominate the all who get in his way. Luna’s home world is under siege by Vyr, and so the pair are teamed up to find a way to stop him. The story is light-hearted in nature in spite of the apocalyptic setting, and while it’s not going to be a tale for the ages, it’s enjoyable enough.

The real crux of what I’ve enjoyed about Cosmic Canines is once again the gameplay. The titular grapple returns, and it feels more fluid use this time round. One of the things I struggled with in the original game was the aiming of the grapple, but here I found it far easier to use. It feels a bit more forgiving in allowing us to latch onto grapple points even if we’re not quite in the right position, and is all the better for it. Though I do think there were much fewer opportunities to use it throughout the game, with a good chunk of the traversal taken up with wall jumps, dashes, climbing and using some of the newer powers.

First of these is Luna herself. We take it in turns to play with Luna and Pablo, each with their own levels in each area. Pablo’s play more similarly to those in the original (with the aforementioned improvements), but for my money, Luna takes the top dog position. She has the same grapple ability as Pablo, but is equipped with some extra useful abilities he doesn’t have.

A super handy dash move lets her get over gaps, and this can even be angled to reach higher points of interest. It also lets her get out of danger by dodging by attacks, and is used frequently in conjunction with the grapple to traverse some tricky sections of levels. She also comes equipped with a gun – she’s unable to punch the enemies like Pablo, so we use this to attack. Because the default weapon has a huge range it can feel a bit like cheating to start with, but later levels swarm us with strong enemies that mean we’re going to have to dash, grapple, and shoot at the same time. I found myself having more fun with Luna’s levels because of her skill set, and would prioritise her levels over Pablos in any new areas.

Both dogs get new powers in certain levels, and these can be fun even if a couple are less intuitive to use. Pablo’s use of the electricity to ride magnetic walls gives a chaotic speed to his sections, and the fauna grapple grants him an extra jump and boost for tricky platforming sections. His fire ball ability is less fun to use as it just shoots us in one direction until we let go of the trigger, and quickly changing directions isn’t all that easy to pull off, nor that enjoyable. Luna’s variants of these also just amount to giving her a powerful new gun to use, and while the puzzles associated with them are simple they are still mostly enjoyable. Plus, her fire gun basically gives us a flamethrower and, yeah, more of that please.

Level design is top notch most of the time, with tricky platforming, a good range of enemy encounters, and plenty of hidden areas to suss out. Each one offers three gems (a certain amount of which are essential to progress in the game) and one hidden, optional chest to find. Some are quite sprawling indeed, and finding all the gems proved challenging late on. I ended the game with just over half collected, so there’s plenty to go back and do.

One stand out set of stages were musically rhythm based, with the whole stage two tone in colour and platforms blinking in and out of existence with the beat. It was a nice change of pace to the other levels in Cosmic Canines and I’d like to have seen more of these quirky style levels throughout.

There are challenge levels to tackle in each area that use set rules (such as race to collect the items, or use that areas power item to get to the end the fastest etc). They are a fun change too, albeit a bit on the easy side; there were only a couple I struggled to get Gold on, and more than a few were beaten well within the Gold time on my first try.

Conclusion

With improved movement mechanics, new dog Luna’s abilities, and a lot of content to get to, Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines is a better overall game than its predecessor. The optional levels are a bit easy, and Luna makes playing as Pablo feel a bit weak, but this is still an easy recommendation for anyone looking for some pure, fun platforming action.