Gravhounds lands on Xbox Game Pass as the service’s next free game on November 2, and your squad is made up of five dogs: Luna, Zane, Dozer, Selene and Finn. The game describes them as “loyal, obedient, and expendable,” which covers most of what you need to know going in.
The target audience is the Helldivers crowd. The gag lands because the characters are anthropomorphic dogs, and real dogs already match that description fairly well.
Play solo or bring up to three friends
You can run Gravhounds on your own or with a crew of up to four. Going solo works fine, though a Gravhounds squad gets more interesting once other people join.
A full team can throw objects to one another across the battlefield and put up turrets, generators and fabricators to hold a defensive position. The developer labels it a co-op action builder and sums it up this way: “Drop into hostile planets as a pack, build and defend your base in physics-driven mayhem, and extract with everything you can carry before you become alien chow! The longer you stay, the greater the danger… and the rewards.”
Each shift gets harder the longer it runs
The studio’s own account of a single run sells the game better than anything else, so it’s worth quoting in full: “Jobs might involve recovering alien technology, extracting valuable resources, or establishing infrastructure somewhere the local wildlife would strongly prefer you didn’t. As the operation expands, so do your problems. The longer you stay and the harder you push, the more dangerous the planet becomes. Soon you’re repairing defenses, hauling resources, rescuing somebody who wandered off alone, and deciding whether you have time to grab one more thing before leaving. Good judgment tends to deteriorate as the shift progresses.”
The final line of that quote captures the entire game in nine words.
The dogs are only part of it
There’s more going on in Gravhounds than a first look suggests. Pipelines can be pushed through enemy zones, and that adds a strategic layer reminiscent of old-school RTS games with light base-building and maintenance. Upgrades stop runs from feeling repetitive, and according to the studio, “no two shifts play the same.”
Getting around matters a lot. Rail-riding and dashing move you across the map quickly. As you keep trying to thin out the swarm, repeat runs unlock new Gravhounds, weapons and upgrade paths, and those new characters are the strongest pull to come back.
Game Pass needs a win
The release comes at a useful moment. Game Pass has been through a rough patch, with a price increase followed by a price drop, along with layoffs and studio divestitures that have fans unsure what Xbox will look like in a year. Meanwhile, PlayStation Plus and its Game Catalog have gradually grown into a direct rival.
The service still has plenty of good games, with more coming. Subscribers can gather three friends on November 2 and find out whether Gravhounds holds up once the honeymoon week ends. At worst, you end up as alien chow.