This year has truly been one of indies. We’ve had countless remarkable games produced by independent studios, usually consisting of small teams or even single developers. A lot of these games, in true indie fashion, are weird, quirky, and innovative, providing new perspectives and experiences, or turning established genres into something refreshing. Escape from Duckov is part of this last group, taking the extraction shooter genre, and giving it a recognizable Team Soda spin, turning it into a cartoonish but nonetheless fun experience, which is as strange as it can be. There’s a lot to find in this game, but I can’t say it isn’t without its faults. A fresh approach to an existing genre co Escape from Duckov, as its name suggests, is a game heavily inspired by Escape from Tarkov and other extraction shooters, with that loot-extract-loot again loop at its core. However, though many extraction shooters are largely militaristic, gritty, and realistic, Duckov takes a more lighthearted approach, placing you in a world of humanoid ducks who fight for valuable tech and resources. You take control of a custom-made duck character, and are tasked with looting and extracting from the game’s maps, bringing those resources and valuables back to your base, where you’ll spend them and build from the ground up. Dying out in the wild means losing all your loot, though it can be recovered by looting your own corpse in a subsequent run. Its combat and gameplay are from a top-down, somewhat isometric perspective, with your vision limited to a cone in front of you. This means enemies can still flank you and come from behind, and you won’t see them despite the aerial view. The shooting is meaty, responsive, and oddly satisfying, with many first-person shooters today having way less feedback than this meme-infused game. You also have to be mindful of wounds, energy levels, and hydration, though these extra survival elements don’t matter all too much given how easily they’re remedied by overabundant healing, food, and drinks. It does add an extra layer and depth to the game, so that’s fine. Duckov gives you a bunch of quests to do in each of the game’s maps, usually meant to give you a better sense of progression and a fun way to unlock various new techs and buildable structures. It also adds a general goal to each of your runs, making every venture out into the world meaningful and planned, rather than just a random gathering of resources. The game starts with a smaller map where you’ll spend your first few hours gathering the tools needed to upgrade yourself to a respectable level, enabling you to use better guns and defenses. The bigger, more expansive map costs in-game money to reach and is way more challenging and treacherous, almost as difficult as it is large. Dying in that map means you’ll have to pay the ferryman again, making each defeat on it a costly venture. The maps are also quite dynamic, with enemies engaging each other, wild animals attacking the player and NPCs, fishing mechanics, and obstacles that can be permanently cleared, opening up new ways to traverse from and to the bunker. Duckov is that it’s a single-player game. Extraction shooters are, by and large, multiplayer experiences, or at least co-op, and Duckov’s decision to keep it personal works to some degree, but will cause tedium quickly. Grind, grind, grind Grinding for loot is fun, but repeating the same route over and over is quite tedious. Screenshot by Destructoid And that brings me to the biggest point of contention with this game: it gets boring very fast. Without a multiplayer component, the constant back-and-forth ventures into the overworld quickly outstay their welcome. Looting is fun, and so is the combat, but I just didn’t find it interesting after the few dozen extractions. Searching for an obscure item needed for a quest and not finding it after spending hours out in the map is just not fun, and it did take its toll eventually. Access to the larger map is so costly that it takes a while to earn back the money to venture into it again, and given how dangerous the enemies on it are, you’ll probably be grinding away for hours on end on the smaller map just to be able to go in and reclaim your lost loot. What’s more, dynamic events can make the game even more challenging, with periodic storms and elite robot squads emerging at night, forcing you to extract or skip time in the game. It’s not that big of a deal to wait something out, but it does add a layer of tedium to the experience, itself already a grind-fest. If there were less grind in this game, the base management and extraction vibes would be off the charts. As it is, though, I can’t say it was all too fun after a while, which is a shame considering the many qualities the game has. Duckov has mod support out of the box, so I can see the community patching up any issue with the game, which is, of course, no excuse for the base experience. It’s different, it’s strange, and outright weird. I don’t even know who the audience for this game is supposed to be. But, at the end of the day, it’s an indie innovation, which I welcome with open arms, and hope to see Team Soda do more with its unique style. The post Escape from Duckov review 2025’s weirdest game yet appeared first on Destructoid.
