Feb 25

Feb 25 Grapple Dog | Review (Switch) - Troublesome, Loveable Mutt

If you’ve ever owned a dog you’ll understand. You love them to bits, but one morning you wake up at the crack of dawn because they want out and as soon as you let them out, they want back in. This goes on until midday. At some point, you rediscover your missing shoe - now separated from its sole. Soon it starts raining and you still have to take them for a walk. You trudge through the wet weather, and as soon as you arrive home cold and wet and tired, you ask yourself why you do this to yourself.

But hey, you can’t blame them, they’re just a dog after all. If anything, your annoyance is your own fault. That’s my relationship with Grapple Dog. 90% of the time I love it and want to share it with everyone I meet, but every now and then it feels like a walk in the rain.

Grapple Dog is like a platformer that fell out of the past. If Sega made a handheld to compete with the GBA or DS and decided to launch with something other than Sonic, that would be Grapple Dog.

The set-up is simple, you play as Pablo, a dog, who finds a grappling hook.

There is little more to the story than that with being Pablo being a research assistant, references to an ancient inventor, ruins, an evil robot and four MacGuffins but they are few and far between. That being said, the story that runs throughout Grapple Dog is earnest without being overbearing. Elevated by the wonderful character barks (pun intended) as text scrolls - Pablo makes cute pixelated woofs, Nul the robot sounds like dial-up internet, while Toni the rabbit makes… whatever noise rabbit would make if it was stuck inside of a Gameboy.

Girls only want one thing and it is a Super Mario World inspired overworld.

The story is just there to propel you into the gameplay (pun intended once again). Levels are connected by a very Super Mario World overworld. Comparisons between the two games seem almost inevitable and are further encouraged by a literal “P-speed” meter and the plethora of hidden stages that can be unlocked by collecting blue coins. Once you enter the levels themselves, however, Grapple Dog leaves its Mario trappings behind, allowing for comparisons to a certain Blur Blue to become apparent.

It’s a game laser-focused on momentum: you build speed, which is maintained and increased by your movement, jumping and, of course, your grappling. However, unlike a famously fast blue hedgehog, Pablo isn’t a particularly speedy animal himself. He is, in a very literal sense, a choker of a woofer. Even his fastest running speed, obtained with a full P-speed meter, is really not too quick in the grand scheme of things. In order to really start zooming through levels, you need to make use of your grappling hook to swing back and forth while finding the perfect angles to detach and go flying.

This is when Grapple Dog is at its best - when you are flinging this fella, across perilous gaps, improvising and enjoying the ride as you go. Almost every level in the first three worlds introduces a new fun movement mechanic - water that you can boost out of, balloons that you can bounce off and DKC-equse cannons that are, quite literally, a blast. It’s this sense of momentum that makes some of Grapple Dog’s other design choices and the change in pace towards the end of the game is so baffling.

Wondering when Grapple Dog is at its most fun?
Right here, this gif.

The first choice, which is more so strange than necessarily negative, is how levels are gated. You play 1-1 to unlock 1-2 and so on, but once you reach the end of a world you need to have a certain number of purple gems to face the final boss. You can collect up to seven purple gems in each level, this is fine for the first few worlds where the hidden gems are not very hidden and the challenge gems are none too challenging but eventually you will get to the end of a world without enough purple gems. At this point, you need to backtrack through these levels and carefully retrace your steps and play the same level again, but slower, looking for those gems you passed earlier because you were too busy swinging through the air.

The second major issue with Grapple Dog is much more wide-ranging and has a lot of knock effects. It is hard to put in a delicate way but the final two or so worlds are just way too difficult for the welcoming and cute tone of the game and free-flowing gameplay. The final act of Grapple Dog just feels misplaced. The game thankfully includes two accessibility options of “invincibility” and “infinite jump” for when you inevitably get tired of falling in the same pit over and over. But even with these concessions, the latter half of Grapple Dog turns into what feels more like a Kazio hack of the base game than a continuation of what comes before.

You will fall into pits of spikes and lava… a lot.

In the first 80% of the game, new mechanics are layered on quick and fast, in new and fresh combinations that encourage you to swing around the level. However, the final two worlds of Grapple Dog instead decides to focus on combining previously existing mechanics into the most demanding strings of challenges imaginable. The game also becomes hyper-focused on disappearing platforms while demanding a level of accuracy controls and weighty movement don’t allow for (at least not at the speed the game expects of you).

The worst thing is this difficulty spike drags attention to some of the game’s previously forgivable flaws to the extent that they become major frustrations. Something wonderful about challenging platformers like Celeste is their generous checkpointing that gets you right back into the action but Grapple Dog will send you back to a checkpoint that feels like you passed ages ago and then demands you recollect all the fruit and purple gems you had already obtained. This is compounded even further by not insignificant load times (that only seem to grow longer as the game goes on) and an overall choppy performance on the Switch. All these factors combined with the game’s tendency to drop inputs as the framerate goes down, means the final levels become trial and error where you are required to redo large parts of the level again.

It would be a lot easier to dodge this fire if the Switch didn’t hitch up when there are too many on screen.

It is a shame that parts of Grapple Dog get in its own way so much because I do really like this game. In fact, I would recommend most people play it. I haven’t mentioned the wonderful art design that could have been plucked from cult-classic Hal Laboratory game. Nor have I talked about the zany music which feels like it was ripped from a Sega CD title thanks to its short loops and crunchy low bitrate yelps from someone going “WOO!” or “I WANNA GET INTO IT”.

Grapple Dog is often a lot of fun, but sometimes it can be a bit of a bad boy.