Last year, I bought a cute little indie title called Grapple Dog. It's a fun momentum platformer about a dog with a grapple hook, and while it wasn't anything spectactular, it was a pleasantly enjoyable time thanks to its fluid movement, charming presentation, and the potential it laid for a truly great sequel later down the line. The recently released Cosmic Canines is that sequel.
So before we talk about Cosmic Canines, though, I want to quickly touch on my thoughts on the original Grapple Dog. Overall, I thought this was a pretty good game with a strong baseline but some notable flaws. The movement of using your grapple hook to get around each stage was pretty much on point, it's fluid, fun, reliable, and while it had a bit of a learning curve, it was truly satisfying to master. The level design, while often tough, was generally fair and rewarding to conquer, and there's a decent amount of collectibles and side content for the truly expert players. The GBA-esque art direction reminiscent of games like Drill Dozer gave Grapple Dog a ton of extra visual flair, the story while simple was quite charming thanks to the likable cast of characters, and the sample-heavy new jack swing OST is a real bop of a soundtrack. Most of my gripes with Grapple Dog are the kinds of things that can easily be fixed with a sequel. The level variety within each world just wasn't all there, and the fact that each world only had a single music track only led to more repetition. Some of the boss fights felt like pretty notable difficulty spikes, with the final one in particular really giving me a ton of grief. And aside from some truly inspired setpieces (that dragon boss blew me away), I couldn't help but feel like Grapple Dog played things a bit safe overall.
Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines kicks off where the previous game left off. Main protagonist Pablo and his friends Toni and the Professor learn that their actions in Grapple Dog unintentionally freed an evil force named Vyr who threatens to destroy the multiverse, so Pablo has to team up with another Grapple Dog, the no-nonsense Luna, to stop Vyr. As I said, I liked the story in the first game, and Cosmic Canines does a good job at amping up the stakes while keeping things feeling fun and light thanks to the strong character interactions. You can spot most of the other major characters within the levels, and it's worth chatting to them since you get to see them bond and connect, especially with the new face Luna. I was also surprised to learn that the plot actually had a bit of political subtext to it, definitely not a direction I was expecting but it's weaved into the story really naturally. It's also pretty obvious that Luna was meant to Shadow both in terms of her design and how much of a polar opposite she is to Pablo, but I couldn't help but shake the feeling that this game reminded me of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart more than anything else. They're both these frenetic multiverse-hopping adventures involving the series lead teaming up with who is essentially their counterpart.
And ultimately, that's the big hook. Grapple Dog has been promoted to Grapple Dogs, so you now get two characters to play as. The game is essentially a 50/50 split between Pablo and Luna stages so you'll have to really get used to playing as both of them, but that's cool because both characters feel really nice to place. Pablo roughly controls the same, with his levels being more about fast-paced swinging and bouncing off of enemies. I always thought his grapple hook felt nice to use and rewarding to master, and nothing about that has really changed here. The big addition for his stages are these situational powerups that augment his movement, like an electric power that lets you dash across walls and this insanely OP fireball power that lets you boost in any direction infinitely, basically allowing you to fly. These powerups help a lot to give the game some much-needed variety, and they flow with Pablo's movement in a way that feels really natural and fluid. Introducing more gimmicky movement options are always a bit of a risk, but the powerups in Grapple Dogs were so fun and satisfying to use that I was always excited to see them pop up in a level.
However, the true star of the show is Luna, who gets her own set of levels with an entirely unique moveset. Luna can still use a grapple hook, but she can't slam or bounce off of enemies. Instead, she has a dash move and a gun that you can aim with the R-Stick. Like Pablo in the first game, Luna has a bit of a learning curve in
juggling both the grapple hook and the gun at the same time, but once
you get used to her, I actually found myself preferring Luna to Pablo.
I guess it appeals to the Shadow 05 fan in me. She's got so much fun movement tech like shooting downwards to slow your
descent and using well-timed dashes to wall jump infinitely, and
juggling all of her various moves feels really satisfying in the harder
stages. It also helps that shooting your gun feels incredibly punchy so the simple act of blowing your enemies to bits feels really nice. On top of that, Luna also has her own powerups in the form of alternate guns each with their own unique shottypes and applications, like an electric shotgun or a flamethrower. They're not quite as transformative as Pablo's powerups but they once again add some extra depth and variety to Luna's stages.
When you take in the two playable characters along with the powerups and shottypes, you already get a game with much more varied gameplay than its predecessor. However, the thing that really compounds this increased variety is the level design. As you'd expect from a game that has you hopping across the universe, you visit a much wider range of biomes in this game compared to Grapple Dog 1. Now pretty much every level in every world feels vastly different from each other, with way more action-packed setpieces stuffed in to keep them varied. You get to visit a swamp planet overrun by a frog dictatorship, a black-and-white noir world, a silhouetted rhythm-driven universe, and so much more. Even the level structure can feel varied as several stages toss you in a more open, explorative area and task you with finding collectibles before moving on, and it makes for a fun change of pace. And of course, with more biomes comes a much larger soundtrack with more unique tracks per world, which also very much helps to prevent any feelings of monotony. All of this combined makes Cosmic Canines feel like much more of a fresh, dynamic, varied, and well-paced adventure than its predecessor, fixing most of my biggest issues with the game.
As I mentioned above, one of the bigger sticking points the first game had with a lot of people was its difficulty. The second half of Grapple Dog 1 was quite tough, and the final world in particular felt especially brutal. The boss fights could also feel like pretty tough walls to surpass if you're having enough trouble with one of them, and while I managed fine with the first four bosses, the final encounter with Null really had me frustrated. As for Cosmic Canines, I'm pleased to say that I had a generally easier time with one, only really game-overing once on a boss during the main campaign. Whether or not it's because this game is actually easier than the first, though, I'm not too sure. It could totally just be that I have all that experience and muscle memory from the first game. As for the bosses, I could still see some of them being a difficulty wall for new players, but I didn't have much trouble with them either. The final boss in particular felt noticeably easier than the one against Null which I'm very grateful with. As a whole, I felt the bosses were more fun on average in Grapple Dogs, but none of them even came close to topping that dragon fight in the first game.
Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines also seriously ups the ante in terms of side content. Most of what the first game had is still here, from collectibles tucked away in each stage, to a Time Trial mode for each level, to unlockable bite-sized challenge stages to conquer. However, there's also now a shop filled with outfits and grapple hook skins to buy for both Pablo and Luna, a whole bunch of entirely new hidden collectibles like these especially hard-to-find Duck Bands, and a far beefier postgame world complete with super hard bonus stages, boss rematches, and an unlockable true ending. As far as the presentation goes, Cosmic Canines is roughly on par with the previous game, boasting the same colorful and chunky artstyle that made Grapple Dog stand out so much, though the more wacky and varied environments are a definite upgrade in my eyes. Like the original game, though, it does have a few performance issues on Switch. The loading times aren't awful, but they're not especially fast either, and when tons of particles are flooding the screen (especially in Luna's stages), you can definitely notice a few drops. It's not unmanageable, but it is noticeable. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is quite a bit different. Not only is it over double the length of the first game's OST, but even the tracks themselves go on a lot longer. The music is also a lot more varied here too, as while there are still a few of those catchy funk tunes that defined the first game, there's overall a wider variety of genres ranging from some truly heavenly synthwave tracks and some banger industrial rock themes for every single boss. It's a more ambitious, experimental, and dynamic score that complements the game itself incredibly well, and gets even better the more I listen to it. As for which OST is better? Well, the first game's soundtrack will always be a really comfy listen for me with its upbeat mid 90s Sega vibe, but Cosmic Canines' music is certainly a lot more complex and substantial meaning that I think it just barely beats out the former for me.
Overall, Grapple Dogs: Cosmic Canines was a surprisingly stellar sequel, maintaining the strong core of the original game and patching up all of its flaws. I love the new playstyle introduced with Luna, the level design is more interesting and inventive thanks to the wider range of environments and the fun powerups, the difficulty is seemingly a bit more reasonable, the side content and postgame is a bit more compelling, the soundtrack is longer, the story feels more consequential, and the level of quality remains high the whole way through. It's a textbook example of how to do a killer sequel, and I'm happy to see just how much the developers seem to have grown and improved with their craft.
4.5/5 Stars
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