Doug Hates His Job Review

"I Don't Like Doug's Life"

Campaign

May 5, 2020 at 4:05am
By Jason Stettner

This is one strange mix of gameplay styles thrown together. It’s actually creative in that regard, yet ultimately shallow in almost every way. I liked the concept of what they were going for, and it wouldn’t have been too bad if it wasn’t so infuriating. It’s got a weird difficulty twist in what are some comically small game segments.

For the most part you’re performing side brawling which is awkward as hell. You might then be driving a car for ten seconds or so in a mission, or then doing bar trivia as examples. There are moments where you choose certain dialogue options, and that might alter what’s going to happen. I find that aspect interesting, and I think the core idea here is good. It’s the general execution of it that just doesn’t quite work out well for it.

It really was tiring, and I was certainly a tad annoyed by it, being completely done with the game upon initial completion. I didn’t really have a desire to get those last couple Achievements since the combat wasn’t great to work through, especially that end boss segment. Still, the story was neat and this guy has one troubling job to do for sure.

Gameplay

For the most part it’s a 2D brawling game that’s presented in short segments. Fight in the park, battle in a bank. Sometimes you’ll work through on rails shooting spots, trying to perform at trivia or even engaging in one awful stealth mission. It’s got terrible hit detection quite honestly. I did like the simplistic geometry style art, that was neat.

There wasn’t a whole lot of depth within the world, but the character models were unique to see. It’s really hard to dive into this part of the review as there isn’t a whole lot to the game. I recall the music being alright I suppose.

The Conclusion

Doug Hates His Job is a really poorly put together experience, it has an intriguing concept with the worst execution I could have imagined. There are some parts of this that I find interesting, it’s a shame they didn’t come together in a satisfying way. It’s a short, aggressively frustrating sort of game and just weird to play. This is likely one that I’ll forget about going forward.

Again, it has some neat ideas and I think they spread themselves too thin when it comes to making the game modes interesting. They created a weird action setup that felt like Walter Mitty almost in terms of being the office dreamscape, at the same time it doesn’t hit near that sort of artistic mark. I liked some parts, didn’t like most of it and there’s not a lot of meat here. I’d say the value is in replaying it, but I doubt many will want to.

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Doug Hates His Job Review on Xbox One X
Review Code Provided by Super Villain Games

Rating Overall: 3.8