I have 7,500 hours in DOTA 2, and if you looked at my match history, you’d think I had an allergy to core heroes. I play support—almost exclusively. When I log into Elite Dangerous, I don’t look for dogfights or bounty contracts; I load up my cargo bay and ferry materials across galaxies. Euro Truck Simulator 2 is unironically one of my most-played games. I love logistics, infrastructure, and keeping the team running smoothly from behind the scenes.
Because of this, big multiplayer shooters have mostly passed me by over the years. If they have a single-player campaign, I’ll play it, but I rarely do more than dabble in their multiplayer offerings. In most competitive shooters, if you aren’t clicking heads, you aren’t doing much, and my withered millennial fingers simply cannot keep up with twitchy teenagers cracked out on energy drinks. Even when I want to pull back and help from the back lines, the few support actions that exist are usually treated as an afterthought—a secondary mechanic that grants a splash of XP while you get back to shooting.
WARDOGS fixes this, and it does so by borrowing a page from an unexpected source: RuneScape.
In RuneScape, the philosophy is simple: the more you do a thing, the better you get at it. Want higher Woodcutting? Chop trees. Want better Magic? Cast spells. WARDOGS translates this logic directly into a tactical, multi-team FPS. Progression is tied directly to what’s in your hands and what you’re actually doing. If you spend a match running around with medical gear, you level up your Medic track. You don’t have to fire a single bullet to make meaningful, tangible progress.
As a support-style player, this design is pure bliss. In WARDOGS, being a field doctor isn’t a side gig; you can make it your whole occupation. You start with basic manual revives and bandages. As you spend rounds keeping soldiers alive and pulling casualties out of the line of fire, your Medic level climbs. That XP opens up access to specialized equipment like the Field Resuscitator and eventually the Defibrillator at Medic level 11, which lets you instantly bring teammates back to life. Once you earn the level right to buy them, every successful revive feeds both your Medic XP and your persistent in-game bank account.
You can spend an entire 100-player match without pulling a trigger once, finish with zero kills, and feel like the most valuable player on the field.
The genius of WARDOGS is that this “action-equals-progression” loop extends across every role. If you prefer building over fighting, the Support track lets you lay down fortifications, set up Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), and resupply frontline troops. The more structures you build and repair, the faster you level up Support—unlocking heavy construction equipment, entrenching tools, and anti-vehicle hardware like the RPG-7.
For those who prefer information control, the Recon track heavily rewards tagging enemy positions with binoculars and spotter scopes. Sitting on a ridge and painting targets for your team’s artillery or infantry doesn’t just feel tactically rewarding; every spot assist pumps XP directly into your Recon line, unlocking advanced rangefinders and ghillie suits.
WARDOGS treats drivers and pilots as dedicated roles. Shuttle-dropping a squad of infantry into a contested Control Zone gives you dedicated Driver or Pilot XP and cash based on how many passengers you safely transport. You can literally play the game as a high-stakes combat taxi driver, playing music over proximity chat while ferrying troops into the meat grinder.
Having started my journey with first-person shooters on MS-DOS with Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold, and having lived through Call of Duty’s entire reign atop the FPS mountain, I honestly thought shooters, especially military shooters, were largely figured out.
WARDOGS is a refreshing take on a familiar formula—brought to us by a relatively unknown development team and a publisher better known for niche indie titles and local co-op arcade games. They’ve built a shooter where support roles feel valued.
Now, if only the server queues would clear up so I could actually get into a match.
