Mad Dogs Review (Mobile)

Introduction

Mad Dogs is a Free-to-Play turn-based tactical role-playing game similar to games like XCOM and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle. It was published and developed by TsarTech for mobile devices on the 1st of September 2017. There are microtransactions in Mad Dogs as there are in almost every free-to-play game. The game is also rated 18+.

Mad Dogs is available on mobile and is free-to-play.

Mad Dogs Trailer

Story

The story for this game is rather simple, you create your gang and work your way up by killing enemy gangs until you control the city, a story reminiscent of GTA, Saint’s Row and even Mafia. Of course, it’s no simple task, you start off with poor equipment and some quite unimpressive gang members. Every battle is a fight to survive, to become stronger and to slowly take control of the city. Before each story mode mission there is a little bit of information given to you setting the scene but apart from that you’re just going in there and killing the enemy gang.

Gameplay

As said before this game bears a great resemblance to XCOM, a game I have poured a fair few hours in for its tactical turn-based gameplay. Mad Dogs replicates this as well as a mobile game could, the maps are quite big considering the small screen and there are multiple options of how your chosen gang member can act. The two often overlooked but essential options are Alert Mode and Caution Mode. The former makes it, so your character will automatically attack the first enemy that moves into range, the sniper in my gang gets at least one kill a game because of this. The later will make your character hide behind cover meaning that they can’t be targeted by ranged attacks or abilities.

A nice touch is that you have to reload your gun after you’ve unloaded an entire clip into the nearest enemy, something that other games like this fail to do. It’s the little details like this that really elevate games to the next level.

Each one of your gang members will have a special ability that they can activate, one of my personal favourite being the one used by the Joker because it’s hilarious. The Joker ties a hot air balloon to an enemy and they fly off the screen for a turn, they then plummet to the ground taking a small amount of damage. While the damage is small this ability can be invaluable as you can make a character miss their turn. Even though the Joker is nowhere near the best gang member I use him as much as possible, just to have a good laugh at his ability.

There are a lot of stats for every character which help you analyse which characters would best fit your gang, everything from their health to the damage they do with weapons. You’ll never find someone who has everything though, so you have to find a good balance amongst your gang members. I prefer running a high health character who can take a lot of damage while I have some heavy damage dealers hang back as they have very little health.

At first, these stats won’t matter too much as you play the story mode however when you start to do some PvP you’ll find that those stats are crucial. Although you’ll quickly find out the best team as the majority of people use the exact same gang members.

Graphics and Audio

The graphics are amazing, they’d honestly look better than some of the console games you pick up nowadays. While the scenery is nice to look at as the environment changes for some battles, it’s the animations and characters that look the best.

Every character has a running animation, a crouching one for when hiding behind scenery and obviously shooting and melee attack animations. Another nice fact is that they all look very detailed, something hard to pull off on an app game.

The best part though it the death animations, there is, of course, a copious amount of blood as the character collapses a tombstone rises up where the character died. The only downside is that it doesn’t remain on the field for long like they do in Worms.

The audio for Mad Dogs is good. Weapons all sound as you’d expect them to and the soundtrack is appropriate for the Mad Dogs world. There’s nothing outstanding here but the audio is a lot better than it is in most games you’ll get on mobile.

Conclusion

Mad Dogs is a fun mobile game for lovers of tactical turn-based RPG’s, if you love games like XCOM, then I’d definitely recommend downloading it. While it can’t compare to its rivals on console or PC, it certainly stands out amongst mobile games in this genre. It’s certainly not going to make you put down your controller or let go of your mouse but it’s a perfect little game if you’re on a long bus or train ride and need something to occupy yourself. However, if you’re not a fan of this genre of game then look for something else, this game won’t change your mind on the genre as a whole.