This year was truly the year of the indie. We’ve had countless amazing games produced by independent studios, usually consisting of miniature teams or even individual developers.
In true indie style, many of these games are strange, quirky and creative, providing up-to-date perspectives and experiences or twisting established genres into something refreshing. Escape from Duck falls into the latter group, taking the extraction shooter genre and giving it the recognizable Team Soda style, turning it into a cartoonish but nonetheless fun experience that’s as weird as it gets.
There’s a lot to find in this game, but I can’t say it’s not without its flaws.
A fresh take on an existing genre
Escape from Duckas the name suggests, it is a heavily inspired game Escape from Tarkov and other extraction shooters whose core is again the loot-extraction-loot loop. However, while many extraction shooters are largely militaristic, gritty and realistic, Duck takes a more lighthearted approach, placing you in a world of humanoid ducks who fight for valuable technologies and resources.
You take control of a custom-made duck character and your job is to plunder and mine from the game’s maps, then bring resources and valuables back to your base where you can spend them and build from scratch. Dying in the wild means losing all your loot, although you can get it back by looting your own corpse in the next round.
Combat and gameplay are top-down, somewhat isometric, with your vision circumscribed to the cone in front of you. This means that enemies can still flank you and come from behind, and you won’t see them despite the bird’s eye view. The shooting is meaty, responsive, and oddly satisfying, and many first-person shooters today receive significantly less reviews than this meme-filled game.
You also need to be mindful of wounds, energy levels, and hydration, although these additional survival elements don’t matter much considering how easily they can be remedied by over-medicating, eating, and drinking. It adds an extra layer and depth to the game, so that’s fine.
Duck offers a number of tasks to complete on each game map, usually intended to provide a better sense of progression and a fun way to unlock various up-to-date technologies and structures to build. It also adds an overall goal to each run, so that each venture into the world is meaningful and planned, rather than just haphazard resource gathering.
The game begins with a smaller map where you’ll spend the first few hours gathering the tools you need to upgrade to a decent level, allowing you to apply better weapons and defenses. Reaching a larger, more broad map costs in-game money, is much more tough and treacherous, almost as tough as the large one. Dying on this map means you’ll have to pay the carrier again, making any failure on this map a costly endeavor.
The maps are also quite vigorous, with enemies fighting each other, wild animals attacking the player and NPCs, fishing mechanics, and obstacles that can be permanently removed, opening up up-to-date ways to move to and from the bunker.
Duck is that it is a single player game. Extraction shooters are essentially multiplayer or at least cooperative games DuckThe user’s decision to keep it somewhat personal is somewhat effective, but it can quickly become dull.
Grind, grind, grind
And this brings me to the biggest point of contention with this game: it gets dull very quickly. Without a multiplayer element, constant trips back and forth into the world quickly become unacceptable.
Looting is fun, as is combat, but after dozens of extractions, I didn’t find it fascinating. Searching for an unknown item needed to complete a task and not finding it after spending hours on the map is no fun and ultimately took its toll.
Accessing the larger map is so pricey that it takes a while to get your money back and venture back into it, and given how threatening the enemies are on it, you’ll likely find yourself traversing the smaller map for hours just to be able to enter and recover your lost loot.
Moreover, vigorous events can make the game even more challenging as periodic storms and elite robot squads appear at night, forcing you to mine or skip game time. Waiting something out isn’t a large deal, but it adds a layer of boredom to the experience that is already a grind-fest in itself.
If there was less grind in this game, the base management and extraction vibes would be unthinkable. However, as it stands, I can’t say it was too much fun after a while, which is a shame considering the many things this game had going for it.
Duck it has mod support, so I see the community patching every issue with the game, which of course is no excuse for the core experience.
It’s different, it’s weird and just weird. I don’t even know who the target audience for this game is. But ultimately, this is an independent innovation that I welcome with open arms and hope that Team Soda will do more with its unique style.
