Dogfight: A Sausage Bomber Story is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up reminiscent of the arcade games I used to play as a kid such as R-Type. It’s available on multiple platforms but I’m playing the PS5 version. Developer Katsu Games have created a visually pleasing experience in which you take control of a bomber pilot defending their country against invasion by the Vega Nation.
If you caught the pun in the name of the antagonists, you know what kind of humour to expect here. The plot is conveyed through static images for the most part and sees your selected pilot making use of multiple sausage themed weapons. It’s daft but the humour is very welcome in a genre that can often take itself a little too seriously.
The gameplay in Dogfight: A Sausage Bomber Story is fairly standard for this type of game. You maneuver your plane from left to right blasting enemies out of the sky (and a few on the floor). Enemies will drop points, weapon upgrades and health top-ups and each level is punctuated with a boss enemy. These often take the form of a ‘Mega-Plane’ or ‘Mega-Tank’ and will often have obvious weak points to hit. These boss also, at time, makes use of an interesting feature where you turn the plane around and attack from the other side of the screen. In my opinion, the game doesn’t make use of this feature enough which is a shame as it adds an interesting mechanic to a tried and tested formula.
Rising Through The Ranks
Each of the nine levels ends with a star rating that relates to the number of enemies you downed with five stars being awarded only to those brave pilots able to defeat every enemy. Thankfully, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds and with the dearth of weapons available and the relative shortness of the levels, should be achievable even on the higher difficulty levels. Speaking of which, there four difficulty levels which are named are humourously named for spicy sauce. Atomic is the hardest, but once you’ve nailed the gameplay loop, Atomic really isn’t too bad. For more of a challenge, you can use speed run mode which, you guessed it, makes things faster.
One very welcome and rarely seen in modern gaming is a local co-op where you can join up with three friends to take on the might of the Vega Nation. It’s crazy to me that more games don’t feature couch co-op as it definitely adds to the enjoyment and longevity of the game in general.
Trophy Trouble
I only really encountered one issue while playing the game and this may not necessarily affect everyone that plays it but it introduced an error into my PS5 that eventually led to me requiring a factory reset. I did a little digging and some games in the past have caused a corruption in the trophy list that causes an error when manually syncing the trophies. This has left me reluctant to reinstall the game but I do want to stress that this doesn’t affect my opinion of the game itself.
Dogfight: A Sausage Bomber Story – Summary
Overall, I found the game incredibly enjoyable, if a little easy and short. The soundtrack was fantastic throughout and the visuals very pleasing to look at. In general, the presentation of the game is top notch even for a budget-title. If the trophy error can be patched, it is definitely a game I’d like to revisit at some point to finish it off and add another Platinum to my collection. I’d definitely recommend this to gamers new and old as a bit of fun for a few hours.
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