Games

Is WARDOGS worth it? 145 hours in

By George In The Meta · 4 Oct 2026

196 h played · Steam, 11 Oct

Short version: yes, it's worth the $39.99 in early access. I'm 145 hours in by Steam's count, most of it solo, streamed from Thailand on about 30 ping, and it still doesn't feel like I'm doing the same match twice.

That's the answer. The rest is how I got there, because the game I play now is not the game I played for the first 50 hours.

Is WARDOGS worth $40 in early access?

Yes. Forty bucks well spent.

I've got the game now. If the price goes up by the time it hits 1.0, which I'd guess it might, I don't care, I already own it. And by then God knows how many hours I'll have in it.

What keeps it from getting stale is the scale. There are 100 people on a map that size. In Valorant or CS you learn the angles on a small arena map and you're doing the same thing every round. Here, the chances that the seventh green guy from the left is stood next to the exact same tree again are basically zero. You can snipe people from long range all day and it still plays out differently every time.

How I play it now: from truck driver to recon

I started as a supply driver and ended up full-time recon. Trucking has its own page: how WARDOGS logistics works, from a level 10 driver.

For the first stretch I was a driver. Level 10 in the driver tree with barely any combat levels, running a Ural full of supplies. Then I hit a point where I couldn't see why I'd go further. There was more to unlock, but I didn't need any of it. The Ural holds two pallets, and on the ground that's as good as it gets. The step up is a tank or artillery, and those seemed aggressively easy to take out if the other team had one person with an RPG.

So I swapped. Now I'm recon, every single match. Two loadouts:

• Binoculars, a range finder or an infrared range finder ("thermals"), and a pistol. Pure spotting. I get close to their FOB, because that's the best position to see people, and I call out everything that moves.
• The full sniper kit. Rifle, pistol, infrared range finder. I sit slightly further back, or inside one of the houses in the built-up areas, and spot and shoot from there.

On 2 October BULKHEAD took infrared range finders out of the vendor until Season 2, when they come back needing batteries (why they were removed). The plain $400 range finder in my loadout below is a different item.

I never leave the circle and I very rarely die. The way I played between 10 and 50 hours and the way I played between 100 and 130 hours are basically two different games.

Is WARDOGS good solo?

It is, but you have to play it differently. Solo here means queueing alone into the same 100-player matches as everyone else.

Solo, nobody is coming to pick you up and nobody is backing you up. You'll often be fighting 1v3 because your team isn't there to talk to. And if they are nearby, you're on proximity chat, which the enemy team can hear too. So you can't really call things out.

It makes you more careful in one way and more brazen in another. When I'm alone I'll get within about 100 metres of their FOB, because I know that if I don't shoot, nobody is ever going to see me. In a squad I wouldn't do that, because I don't know what the other three are about to do.

What ping do you get in Southeast Asia?

About 30 ping from Thailand on the official Asia (South East) region. Community guides say those servers are in Singapore; BULKHEAD hasn't confirmed it anywhere I've seen. More on regions, community servers and when maintenance lands in Thai time: best WARDOGS servers for Southeast Asia.

WARDOGS or Arma Reforger?

If you want three-team, 100-player PvP where logistics decides the fight, WARDOGS. Beyond that, I haven't played Reforger, so I'm not going to pretend to compare them. What I have played is a lot of Arma 3, a lot of Arma 3 mods and a lot of DayZ. If that's your background, WARDOGS will feel familiar in the ways that matter, just more accessible.

Three things I wish I'd known before my first match

1. It's closer to a milsim than you think. Don't be ridiculous with your parachute or you'll just die.
2. Most of the starting guns are pretty useless. You're better off supporting other people than trying to be the one-man squad that takes on nine.
3. You don't lose money just by being in the circle. If you're ever down bad, go and sit in the circle and don't die.

"It's too slow"

People are going to complain it's sluggish. Look at where they're coming from.

The Call of Duty people play now isn't the Call of Duty we started on. Everything has drifted towards arcade movement. I don't need my game to be fully realistic, but I also don't expect to double jump, 180, slide, pop up, slide again, flick left and right and hit people while doing all of it. That's not how humans move. If you want me to believe a person is doing this, that's not it.

A lot of the people calling WARDOGS slow came from Call of Duty, ARC Raiders and shooters where the movement is a lot more arcade than real. Come at it from Arma 2 and the old milsims and you'd probably say it's too fast. It sits in between. If you need flashing lights and jangling keys in front of your eyes every four seconds, this isn't your game, and that's fine.

The best thing in it has nothing to do with shooting

Driving a Ural down a road, another Ural coming the other way, and he's on the correct side of the road too. We toot as we go past.

There's no reason for any of it. We don't need to be on the road. We don't need to be on the correct side of it. We definitely don't need proper driving etiquette in a war game. Everyone does it anyway.