Revealed during Gamescom, Gravhounds is an upcoming co-op shooter with canine characters and an explosive approach to tower defence and base-building.
Gravhounds is also the work of Octupus Panic, an upcoming indie studio made up of experienced devs, including, notably, Halo 4 creative director Josh Holmes (no relation). As a long-time Halo fan, that alone was enough to pique my interest.
Now… if you throw in the fact that I love sci-fi, roguelites, shooters, base-building, and I’ve got a dog called Chewie, I think I might be a core part of the game’s target audience!
What is Gravhounds, then?
When I first saw the Gravhounds announcement, embedded below, I didn’t clock the roguelite elements at first. What I did see was a third-person shooter with anthropomorphised characters and high production values, with a dash of canine charm for good measure.
Gravhounds is a third-person co-op shooter, intended to support up to four people. I played it alone, and it did feel a bit empty when experienced solo; however, I was able to see what kind of game Octopus Panic is cooking up, and the potential is definitely there.
As mentioned, the game has both action-roguelite and extraction shooter elements, but it’s also got a base-building core. Out of all of the game’s component parts, it’s this building aspect that informs your overall decision-making the most, I think.
In this quirky co-op shooter, you play as one of a team of canine scavengers, the eponymous Gravhounds. Together, you are sent to a series of planets on resource fetch quests, because you know, a dog’s gotta eat!
You start each mission at the base of your drop ship, and while ostensibly you’re there to go forth and gather resources, you also have to protect yourself by building out your defences. If you don’t, when the aliens start attacking en masse, they keep on coming, wave after wave, until you either extract or die.
That being so, a robust defence is essential, especially during later waves. This is achieved via the liberal deployment of turrets, which you must connect together via cabling, and then keep powered and repaired during sustained waves of attacks.
Explosive Action
The gunplay is absolutely fine, no complaints there. There are five different characters as far as I can tell. I tried a couple of them, so I can’t comment on overall balance, but there does seem to be some interesting differentiation between them.
Things get even more interesting when you start blending the gunplay with the base-building. At first, the basic turrets support your efforts as you gather whatever resources you need, but it’s not long before ignoring your upgrades will get you in trouble.
Luckily for everyone, upgrading your turrets results in a highly engaging action spectacle, with big swarms of aliens meeting even bigger explosions.
When your turrets are raining fire down on your enemies, and you’re flinging resources at the exit via your grav gun, and the alien swarms are attacking from all over, that’s when the game’s physics engine comes into its own, and you can see just how much fun might be on the cards.
If Gravhounds is going to succeed when it hits Early Access on PC and Xbox Series on November 2, 2026, it’ll be because cOctopus Panic continues to lean into the explosive physics-based gameplay already in place.
When the rockets streak past and the aliens are sent pirouetting through the sky, Gravhounds shows just what a good dog game it could be with a bit more training during Early Access.
