Neptunia Riders VS Dogoos (PC)

Geoffrey Wright | May 16, 2025 | Review | No Comments

Another yearm another release in the long running Neptunia series. This time we have another spin-off, which means a whole new way to play with a focus on motorcycles, and another goddess taking the lead instead of Nep.

Uzume wakes to find herself no longer in Gamindustri, but in an entirely different dimension on the verge of being swamped by dogoos. Although alone, it appears the other goddesses have been brought to this new dimension and its up to Uzume to find a way of snapping her friends out of their weird fascination with Dogoos!

As always with the spin-offs the story can head in some crazy direction and hand the lead to another character in the series, this time kicking things off with Uzume, so best leave your serious hat at home for this one. There’s several worlds to unlock as you progress, with as many stages in each to complete, with unlockables along to way. The unlockables are needed really to beef out the runtime as you can be done in several hours with this one unfortunately, maybe a little more if you want to unlock all the customisation.

As these kinda games in the series usually find there home on handhelds, its no surpsise to see a similar outlook here. Outside of story segments, using live 2D well as is the norm, Stages should be recognisable too as they’re based on dungeons, and the smaller size allows for some decent enough detail with plenty of dogoos to pack the screen. Main characters are modelled well as always, but some of the secondary characters and vehicles aren’t quite given the same attention. Still, the series anime styling does go some way to masking the downsides and keeps everything looking stylised & punchy.

Sound is always the one contant for this series, everything from music to sound effects is a match, and usual suspects return for the VA – there’s even a dub if you require it. Performance is barely worth a mention given my system (R7 5800X3D/32GB/RTX 3090) seemed to barely wake from its slumber for 4K/120fps – should be great for steamdeck.

As this is one of those spin-offs there’s no turn-based RPG gameplay this time. Given we’ve had all sorts from hack & slash to management sims before, its always interesting to see where they take it. This time? Kinda tough, I guess if you took motorcycles, arena battlers, Katamari, a generous helping of dogoos, and chucked it all into a blender – then this is what you would have. Each stage generally consists of your team vs theirs as you try to hit the collection total of dogoos before the opposition, just ride around collecting or use a few things to get in the way of your opponents doing so.

Luckily that’s not all there is to the gameplay, there’s actually some depth to it too. Sure the early stages won’t need much effort, but later on kitting out your bike and making the most of abilities and dogoo buffs will become more & more a requirement to progress. Attacking the other team is a simple way of poaching what you need, but launching some dogoos to slow down the opposition for example works well in the klong run. There’s not much more variety to the gameplay loop tho unfortunately, so its probably a good things its kinda short.

Neptunia Riders Vs Dogoos is the latest in a long line of spin-offs in the Neptnuia series, taking all the usual characters and throwing them into a new gameplay loop. This time we got motorcycles and dogoos battling for supremacy, and while there isn’t much variety to the gameplay loop and its relatively short, it is a surprisingly fun distraction for fans of this long running series – tho it does seem more suited to portable play with Switch, Steamdeck etc