I hit level 10 driver before I bought my second gun.
That is not a bit. For my first seven hours in WARDOGS I owned maybe two weapons and did not take either of them out of the truck most of the time. I ran supplies. Whole streams titled War Truck Simulator, the session a Ural loaded with building materials and ammunition going from a depot to a forward operating base, dodging mines, dodging helicopters, dodging the infantry sitting in a bush outside the play zone whose only job that round was cutting the supply line. Ninety-three hours later, in under a fortnight, I still think that was the right way to learn this game.
If you are arriving from Battlefield, understand that before you spend the $39.99. Arma Reforger is the closer comparison and that is no accident. WARDOGS grew out of King of the Hill, a cult Arma 3 mod, and Bulkhead brought its original creators Sa-Matra and Roid Rage in from the start. Same lineage as DayZ, except this is the version of that story that worked. The DayZ standalone was a downgrade on the mod it came from. WARDOGS walked out of Arma, got considerably more accessible, and left nothing important behind. Two million copies sold in week one and 84% of nearly 46,000 Steam reviews are positive.
Wardogs Review - Driver-in-command
Biggest discounts, free games, and limited-time offers across every major gaming store.
Never pay full price again.
Gameplay: the mortar that killed you has a supply chain
Here is the whole design in one example. A mortar lands on you in your own FOB. Someone built that tube, in another FOB, which means someone was stood there with a hammer. The materials in his hands arrived because a driver brought them. That driver got paid for the run and so did the builder. Nothing on this map appears out of nowhere.
That is the part people miss when they file it under shooter games. One hundred players, three factions, one randomised control zone, and six role tracks feeding the same objective from different directions. Assault, Medic, Support, Recon, Driver, and Pilot all level separately, and you are never locked into one. The people chasing the gold circle make the most money and get the kills, playing the traditional game, the one that happens on a battlefield rather than the one called Battlefield. Good for them. They are also fighting over ground somebody else supplied.
You can go entire matches without buying a gun. Lie in a bush between the enemy headquarters and the drill towers with binoculars, call out everything that moves, and that is a real strategy rather than a joke role. The spotting kit tiers from binoculars to monocular to rangefinder, and each tier changes what you can do from that bush.
Six roles, one economy
The economy system is the thing that makes team play feel natural rather than forced. Reviving a teammate pays out. Scouting and tagging enemies pays out. Transporting players and supplies pays out. New players who are broke have a reason to do all of these things, and veterans who are flush have a reason to let them, because a well-supplied FOB benefits everyone on that faction.
What you notice after a few sessions is that the tactical ceiling sits just above your head when playing solo. If I spot someone by a building fifty metres out, I can tell my squad. With no squad I am on proximity chat, so the people I am warning about hear exactly where I think they are and where I am saying it from. Good system, working as intended, and the reason a four-man premade is a different game entirely.
Progression: the part that will cost them players
The starter recon rifle might as well be a .22. It is garbage, and you will not level recon by using it. You level recon by spotting with binoculars, so the game is telling you to ignore the weapon in order to earn a better one. Most roles have a version of that route: eat the kit you are handed, doing anything other than shooting, until the role becomes enjoyable.
I stopped driving for a related reason. Nothing beats the Ural. A Humvee carries less and keeps people armoured inside, which is not why I got in a car, and driving into an enemy FOB gets you blown up whether you are armoured or not. So I hit level 10 and stopped. Level 10 is nowhere near the cap. I looked further up the tree and could not find a single thing I wanted.
Wardogs Review - fist fighting
The bugs worth knowing about
The mortars are overpowered and I am confident about this one. You can load three into a tube, cancel the animation, and fire all three back to back. I did voice comms for mortar battalions and artillery in the Royal Signals from 2004 to 2015. That is not how a mortar works. There is no magazine.
Helicopters have a problem that is not about flying. If your passengers die before reaching the play area, you take the penalty. Crash the thing and kill everyone aboard, fair enough, that is on me. But people jump out with no parachute, betting $100 that someone scrapes them up off the ground, and the fine still lands on the pilot.
The community: weirdly polite, and it matters
Drive the Ural long enough and you notice everyone stays on their own side of the road. They toot when they pass. In any other game the optimal line is straight through a field. Here the road is simply faster, so an actual highway code has grown out of it.
Proximity chat is also how I find people. I recognized an accent, said something in their language, and they were in my squad for the round. I have run into the same people on the Asian servers since. Most players pick a faction and stay. I have always been red. Blue gets stomped, and the read is that green and red have slightly better HQ positioning, so newer players pile into blue and get rolled.
For players wondering about platform availability, WARDOGS is PC-only at launch. Check the WARDOGS console release guide for what Bulkhead has confirmed about PS5, Xbox, and Switch.
Graphics and audio: clear rather than busy
Caveat first. I run a high-end machine and played on the highest settings available, so weigh my performance read accordingly.
It looks excellent, and what I keep noticing is how little visual clutter there is compared to Battlefield. That does not make snipers easy to find. It means when you are looking at a treeline you are looking at a treeline, rather than at eleven pieces of interface and a particle effect. Clearer, not easier.
The audio is the bigger achievement. I am deaf in my left ear from service, I play on AirPods Pro with noise cancelling rather than a proper headset, and I can still tell where people are coming from. That should not work as well as it does.
Gunfire is the clever part. You get a usable read on where a shot came from by what it hits around you rather than from the crack itself, which is roughly how it behaves in real life. They have pushed it slightly more directional than reality, though that may be my ears. In a game where lying in a bush listening is a viable career, the sound carries a lot of the load.
Verdict: is WARDOGS worth it?
WARDOGS is the rare shooter where the boring job is the good job. Ninety-three hours and I was never once bored of driving a truck full of planks to a man with a hammer, which is not a sentence I expected to write about a game that has tanks in it.
Bulkhead patches fast. A server browser overhaul shipped inside four days of a 425,000 concurrent peak. That is a studio paying attention. The fighting will always have a draw. The supporting roles are what will lose people, and those are the roles this game is built on. They need more maps. They need the drill towers moving around the maps they already have, so the same three approaches stop being the answer. The supply side needs something to climb towards, because I stopped levelling driver at 10 with most of the tree still ahead of me, having simply run out of things I wanted from it.
Buy it. Then spend your first evening driving a truck instead of buying a rifle, and see whether you understand the game faster than the people shooting at you. For more tips on getting started, the WARDOGS guides collection has you covered.