The playtest for Warhounds shows promise, but the limited slice doesn’t give away much that would make it stand out.
I’ve just finished running through the closed playtest for Warhounds, and it certainly seems like a fun take on the XCOM formula. With that said, there isn’t a huge amount to play with at the moment, and beyond a couple of neat character abilities, the bulk of what you can see at the moment is the fairly standard grid-based tactical cover shooter.
There’s a plot, of course. You’ll head up the titular Warhounds who are a mercenary group sent into a nonspecific African country currently undergoing civil unrest. In the tutorial mission, I rescued the country’s president and fought off insurgents before setting off to “liberate” a ship off the coast which will act as your base. Then I hired a few mercs to bolster the ranks and played one mission with no hand holding before this brief chunk of game ended.
Even though it’s only a small slice of the full game, Warhounds does demonstrate some promising gameplay. The turn-based tactical missions are serviceable, if a little simplistic when compared to other games. You’ll move from cover to cover and abuse overwatch to take out groups of enemy soldiers. Positioning is important, with flanking being a key system, much like in XCOM and the like.
Warhounds’ blurb says you shouldn’t expect RNG to be a factor in your shooting, but you’ll still be given percentage chances to hit. I think this may be referring to XCOM’s tendency to have you miss 95% chance to hit shots quite regularly. The percentages here feel fair, and if you take a 75% chance shot with a burst fire rifle, you’ll hit with a couple of rounds and plink off some damage. I liked this, as it allowed me to set up effective overwatch by chipping off a couple of points of damage on an enemy with a low chance shot before finishing them off as they move between points of cover.
Your new hires aren’t terribly interesting though, with only basic firing and grenades to use meaning they all feel the same. The characters in the tutorial missions have more interesting abilities, like being able to give allies turn points or destroy cover with heavy fire. Hopefully in the full game there will be plenty of options like this, along with the ability to customise your soldiers for that old “friends as characters” thing that’s popular in games like this.
Ironically, the presentation is a bit more hit-and-miss. Everything looks fine enough, and things look clear on the battlefield, but character models are pretty basic for the most part. This isn’t an issue in itself, but Warhounds doesn’t run all that well in spite of not being the most visually special game. I’m not running a monster PC, but when it can run Clair Obscur at 120 fps, then it shouldn’t really struggle to maintain 60 here. It’s early days though, so perhaps optimisation will come with the full game. I should also mention the use of AI here, with placeholder images being used. Personally, I don’t have a huge issue with this so long as genuine artists are used in the final product, but I recognise that others will find this unacceptable.
One final complaint is that the writing and voice acting are pretty dreadful. The devs don’t seem to have English as their first language, so I accept that there will be some oddities here and there, but some of the dialogue comes across as laughable. Then there’s the voice acting which is painfully stilted and unnatural. It sounds like they have native English speakers reading the lines, but everything feels incredibly false with inter character dialogue not fitting together in the slightest. Initially I thought this was text-to-speech, but there’s no acknowledgement of that in the Steam page, so I assume this to be genuine people.
With those complaints out the way though, Warhounds seems to be a solid enough turn-based tactical game. It will need some significant fleshing out, but the bones are there for when it has a full release later in the year.
Warhounds is scheduled for full release later in 2026 on Steam.
