Titanium Hound – Review

Everyone loves a good retro game based on the 16-bit era of titles like Contra, and to relive those memories we’ve got Titanium Hound stepping in to a cyberpunk setting with an extremely large exo-suit.

In a dark and not so distant future, the worlds just about crumbled to pieces and in an attempt to maintain law and order governments have turned to using Titanium Hounds to serve and protect.

Taking control of a Titanium Hound pilot, you’re tasked with exploring strange going-on’s, chasing down criminals and blowing up everything in sight.

When you first step into your hound, you’ll have to work through the tutorial which introduces you to the game mechanics, moving around it pretty simple, then you have your primary fire on the right analogue stick and a non-lethal secondary fire on your left analogue stick.
Defensively, you can pull up a shield with RB when stationary, and dash past enemies with LB though I found it easier to use LB as when stationary it still serves as a shield. If you pass an enemy in this way, you’ll do some damage which is further enhanced if they’ve been stunned with a non-lethal.

To keep things interesting, you have two power-gauges which work in unison, when firing your attack gauge depletes filling up your defence gauge, and when you deploy your shield, it reduces your defensive gauge and fills the attack.

There’s also a combo-blast by pulling both triggers together, this will create a clone of your hound that explodes dealing damage to nearby opponents as well as completely fill one of your bars, if you’re in the blast radius you’ll fill your defense bar, while away from the blast, you’ll fill up the attack bar.

It’s quite a convoluted system which mostly comes down to throwing up a shield when under fire, shooting back when you’re not, and trying to maintain both bars with enough energy so you’re always able to attack or defend accordingly.

Jumping will also deplete attack bar, so you’ll need to ensure you’re not jumping into trouble as you’ll be unable to fire if you’ve not been micro-managing your energy bars.

There’s also a healthy dose of puzzles thrown in for good measure, which are usually based around shooting targets or flicking switches. The first you’ll encounter is on a truck you need to create a space to shoot the brakes, but large platforms are in the way, you can shoot some, and like a sliding puzzle you’ll have to shuffle them around to make the desired space.

Another puzzle on the next level has 6 switches, 3 on increasingly higher platforms and 3 on the floor, you’ll have to hit one on the 1st platform, then return to the floor to hit another to unlock the next platform and so on.
It works well and throws a pleasant change to just shooting everything in sight, but again you’re charged energy for jumping, so expect to sit there recharging those power bars when you need to shoot.

To help along the way, there’s also a variety of power-ups you can unlock and equip between missions, as you might expect these mostly revolve around taking less or dealing more damage.
You’ll want to keep an eye out for armour-scraps which drop from fallen enemies, as these help to slowly repleinish your suits armour (health).

The weapon system does feel like a missed opportunity as I would have loved to see new weapon upgrades mid-level similar to games like the Contra/Probotector franchise, but these are only accessible between missions and most revolve around upgrading your current weapons.
To help with these upgrades you’ll collect crafting parts as you progress, but while this is all explained through mini-tutorials, it always felt a little over complicated.

Over-complication seems to be a regular theme throughout Titanium Hounds, I was really hoping for a Contra clone, shooting enemies, maybe a few alternate fires, big bosses and an arcade feel and when first looking at trailers for Titanium Hounds, that’s exactly what I was expecting, with the dash ability, it looked like it could be faster and more fluid than the popular retro shooter, but instead Titanium Hounds feels withheld by its own confusion.

One problematic area takes us back to something as simple as movement, as much as I tried I couldn’t pin-down exactly what was causing it, but I’d regularly find my movement was halted, sometimes after using the combo-blast, sometimes when switching to a shield, but holding right to move, the control was reset, so I’d need to release the thumb-stick, give it half a second and then push right again, maybe it’s my own fault for being too eager, but I lost count how many times I was caught in enemy fire, without defense energy and needing to escape, yet unable to move, because the game had magically forgotten I’m holding a direction and when some enemies can take down your armour really quickly, this movement glitch at the wrong time can really feel like a gamebreaker.

Another complaint is that give-and-take system, it’s a novel idea, and at times the strategy is fun, as you shield incoming fire to recharge your attack and then unleash bullets once the enemy reloads.
But at times you are faced with a few too many enemies, so you inevitably run out of shield and need to try and avoid incoming projectiles while trying to fire back, or drop a clone and stick close to recharge the shield.
Sure enough, just as you’ve got a full shield, there’s a rare chance to fire back, but you can’t fire, because you need to use up some defensive power.
As mentioned above, it’s a really novel system, but it just doesn’t suit the overall pace of the game and you’re left feeling like a disobedient dog on a leash pulling in one direction only to be tugged backwards again to hit that next terminal.

Otherwise, there’s still a few positives to explore, the mixture of platforming sections, shooting and puzzles is pretty well spread, and it’s just a shame those energy restrictions stop you enjoying them as much.

Overall general level design isn’t bad at all, one minute you’re in an enclosed area, then out on the road where you’ll need to utilise that dash to catch up with the enemy cars you need to destroy, and then sometimes things are a little more maze-like as you’re tasked with finding the terminal A to turn on that other terminal, and then backtracking to hit terminal B to open the door that was next to terminal A yet another instance where Titanium Hound seems to confuse itself, but it’s nice to see things mixed up a little.

When you do get to grips with the micro-management of energy bars, you will find there’s times it flows pretty well, but dying, hitting a terminal or progressing through a door, generally causes a slight delay before action picks up again.
Another confusing area where checkpoints, one minute I’d die and be thrown backwards half the level, with no progress lost, just a long trek back to where I was, to continue shooting, and the next minute, I’d die and be plonked right back in the thick of the action, losing a large slice of health, there’s also a mundane wait to “respawn” and it once again just brings the action to a halt.
I would have preferred to see an instant respawn, and then back to better placed checkpoints after another death, rather than the pic’n’mix system in place.

Graphically, you’ll know what to expect from the screenshots, and Titanium Hound doesn’t disappoint, maybe it all looked a little too “Contra” for me to see it for the convoluted structure it actually is, but overall it’s pretty well detailed, with a nice cyberpunk theme, with only a handful of negatives about objects and enemies not always being as clear and easy to spot as I would like, and a few too many siilar backgrounds for any of them to truly stand out, but for anyone who enjoys a good old fashioned late 90’s side scrolling shooter, you’ll mostly enjoy the aesthetics of Titanium Hound…. Well, until you can’t shoot, and you have to stand still using the shield again.

While the sound doesn’t really set your ears on fire, there’s some decent enough retro inspired background music, and you can hear your bullets fire and non-lethal grenades fizzle away, but there’s no oomph, no metallic clang as you jump, and no enemies screeching as you charge past them dealing damage. What’s great in some places feels very flat and lifeless in others and at times it’s almost like they’ve forgotten to upload half the sound files, because the game could have been made to feel much more alive with a little more attention to detail on what might make a sound as a giant metallic exo-suit charges through an area.

The overall presentation isn’t bad and there’s extra marks for the amount of voice acting rather than endless lines of text to read, just like the gameplay, the voice acting isn’t the most fluent, but it’s adequate.

It’s fair to say I didn’t enjoy Titanium Hound as much as I’d hoped, I think there was plenty of scope for the developers to make a fantastic game, but a few things feel overcomplicated, and there’s no real flow to the gameplay due to micromanaging your energy bars and a couple of controller responsivity issues.

Fans of side-scrolling 2D will find Titanium Hound is a fun and challenging game, that many are likely to enjoy, but only if you can work through the often unnecessarily convoluted gameplay mechanics.

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