Image: Octopus Panic

There's been a whole swarm of great co-op alien-blasting shooters recently. From the enduring success of Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers to the recent early access graduation of Mycopunk. This week, we've got one more, as Gravhounds bounds into early access, and it's already looking to be a quiet hit.

From the little I've played so far, Gravhounds feels like a surface-based take on Deep Rock Galactic, with more than a little bit of tower defense inspiration. Up to four players pick the role of a crew of anthropomorphic space-dogs, landing on hostile planets and running aggressive resource operations (defended by a network of turrets and other defensive structures) against waves of hungry aliens. Well, I guess the dogs are technically the aliens in this situation, but whatever. There's capitalism to be done! Go fetch!

While I've only had a chance to play a bit of this solo, this really does feel like a game built for co-op, with the players splitting the roles between front-line fighting, building turrets, mining resources, and repairing structures that are getting hammered during the fighting.

While you've got guns to deal with enemies, your main tool is a mining and construction beam that lets you place resource pipelines and structure nodes branching out from your mothership. Turrets can only be built on those nodes, after constructing the kits for them at a factory structure.

While you initially have to do much of the mining yourself, if you've got a pipeline in the area, any resources will get caught by it and slowly transferred to your ship. Or you can just launch it using your gravity gun all the way into the open loading bay, but that can be a real long shot. Between missions, you've got a big tech tree of new structures and upgrades to buy, and in the field you can upgrade and tweak your turret layout as needed.

Above all is that it just feels really good to just move around, shoot and build stuff here. The core feel is excellent, with the characters zooming around with rocket shoes or floating around above the battlefield while raining gunfire down. As you level up, you get roguelike pick-3 perks and upgrades for this mission, although your progress gets reset back to zero as you move to the next planet.

There really doesn't seem to be anything to nitpick here. It's a simple, straightforward co-op shooter/tower defense hybrid with good graphics and solid combat. I'd have liked maybe a little bit of AI support when rolling solo, but other than that, this one seems to be shaping up nicely, and it won't be that long until it hits version 1.0.

Gravhounds is out now for £16/$20, with a beefy 25% launch discount, running until November 16th. Early access will be a relatively short affair, lasting around six months, although there might be price increases along the way.