Backlog Beatdown: Saving my Bacon with Hogs of War

So Ebay may very well become my downfall in managing my video game backlog. I’ve been ordering all sorts of titles mainly for the PS1, inspired by the game collector and Youtube star MetalJesusRocks. I’ve bought around 15 games so far and I’ve been having a tonne of fun with the ones I’ve played, most of which I’ve previously owned at some point and it’s leaving me in a nostalgic haze.

And what a delight it was to play Hogs of War again…

The idea was best summarised by the Playstation Magazine Demo Disc it appeared on: “Imagine Worms in 3D. Now put pigs where the worms should be, and…” It is a turn-based tactics game in which you control a squad of usually five pigs. They have a limited amount of time to move around and position themselves to attack the enemy, as almost all the attacks are done from a stationary position. The hogs have a certain amount of health each, which is drained with each attack it takes, and the last team standing is the winner.

I had War Pigs by Black Sabbath going round in my
head all the way through my playthrough of this.

Much of the strategy of the game comes from choosing where to put your pigs and deciding what weapon to use. The sniper rifle, for example, does as much damage as a direct hit from a bazooka, however it can only fire in a straight line and leaves you open to a follow-up attack if you don’t kill your enemy straight away and are in an awkward position. The bazooka has area-of-effect damage and can be fired over terrain, but requires you to ‘charge’ your attack to the appropriate amount of power you need for the shot; if you don’t get this right your accuracy will suffer and you’ll very likely miss your shot entirely. Deciding what to use, when to use it, and where to use it from is the key to getting through some of the harder levels of the game.

The game has a campaign mode, where it puts you in a linear series of 25 levels taking over the continent of Saustralasia. Your hogs are somewhat limited in what they can do at first, but you gain ‘medals’ throughout the game as rewards for completing levels and surviving, and you use these to upgrade your pigs. You can take them down a Heavy Weapons route, or Espionage, Engineering and Medic. You can choose them to suit your play style if you want, but you’ll find it much easier to have two of each (you start with a total of 8 hogs) and swap them in and out of your squad as you need to. A fourth promotion brings them up to Commando level, which specialises in all weapons, and the final level is Hero, who can use more or less all weapons and has a few special ones to work with as well.

The true strength of this game is its sense of humour. Your team of pigs is selected from one of 6 ‘Nations,’ very stereotypically based on the English, French, German, American, Russian and Japanese. They all make amusing and borderline-racist remarks when they make their attack in hilariously overblown accents. Plus the cut-scenes, usually “Training” videos, are funny in their uselessness. The whole thing is capped off by having many of the voice-overs done by the sadly-missed Rik Mayall, whose performance brings the cheesy lines and camp over-acting to life.

The game challenges me at the right level; it’s tough enough in places but the campaign took me around 15 hours to get all the way through and that’s quite enough for me. The AI sometimes makes some very strange decisions indeed, and the controls feel clunky – I suspect this was a quite deliberate design decision that adds to the feel of the game. After all, guns are hard enough to use at the best of times, never mind trying to do it with trotters!

I love this game; I regretted selling it years ago and I’ll certainly be hanging on to it for a good long while this time. Maybe I’m getting old, but I found myself thinking around half-way through my play-through that we just don’t get this kind of game in the mainstream these days. Turn-based strategy games are still something of a niche, and in a Triple-A release, the edgy dialogue would be focus-tested out of the game before you’d even got on to Rik Mayall’s booking agent. Plus, it’s fighting pigs; not relatable in any obvious way (though the game has a surprising amount to say about the futility of war!) and a ridiculous concept. You won’t see this on any Youtube advertisement, and if people still make games like this, then they are consigned to the depths of what is now called Indie Gaming. A bit sad, really.

*EDIT*

Chances are some of you may now be thinking: "Well, this seems pretty good, I'll give it a go." If you do, be advised the PC version of this has slightly better graphics and is inferior in all other respects. The main problem with it is that the enemy pigs don't move, they just stand and fire. This is not a bug but was deliberately coded into the game, and I'd like to find out why, because it should be coded out again with extreme force. It removes any challenge from the game and you're basically just playing a shooting gallery. Get it for the PlayStation, or the handhelds if you can.