Titanium Hound – Review

xboxoldies.com:

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