It certainly looks like it’s going to be a joke. When you create an extraction shooter, but then theme it around cartoon ducks and give it a spoof name based on one of the most popular examples of the genre, it’s hard not to assume Escape from Duckov is just a goof. But I’m here to tell you, nope, this is a solid and astonishingly compelling PvE looter-shooter that deserves every one of its million sales.
I’m not a big extraction shooter guy. (These are first- or third-person games that are generally about entering a battlefield and attempting to harvest as much loot and progress as you can, then extracting yourself before either a timer runs out or you get killed.) This high risk/high reward model tends to feel too stressful to me, and never more so than when it’s all about surviving the attacks of an enemy team of real, human players. It’s like a roguelite but with other people laughing at you, and where loss not only means you don’t keep anything you found, but also anything you arrived with. However, it turns out all I needed was for it to be about ducks.
Inspired by Escape from Tarkov (the lead developer of the five-person Chinese team behind the game told me he’s an avid, hardcore player), but utterly dissimilar in so many important ways, Escape from Duckov strips the formula down to something that feels far more approachable, although just as ruthless. The game is entirely PvE, and played in single-player, but those web-footed CPU enemies aren’t even vaguely friendly. You’re going to die a lot. But importantly, you’re not going to mind nearly as much.
The game begins with the most delightful character creator, in which you build yourself a duck avatar with a lot more variety than you might imagine that concept could offer. The wide, blank, pupil-less eyes were irresistible to me, but I could have chosen anything from buttons to metallic binocular-like protrusions. You can have regular cartoon duck legs, or the utter abomination that is human feet. And given this is an offline premium game with no mercenary in-game purchases, you can change up your look any time you want. You then arrive in your bunker, a large, mostly empty space, but for your little bedroom off the side. Down here is Jeff, your duck companion who will show you the ropes, set you quests, and guide you through the process of building out your base.
To do this, you’re going to need loot, and to get that, you’re going to have to go outside. So originally armed with nothing but a pointy stick, you need to start making tentative ventures into the green and pleasant realm above. It’s just it’s populated by furious birds (and wolves) holding powerful weapons, all determined for unexplained reasons to kill you on sight.
Escape from Duckov‘s greatest trick is just how well it’s designed around welcoming you in. Those early trips can certainly be tricky, but you’ll very quickly be armed (winged?) with a revolver, shooting down opponents (into really quite horrendously gibby goop), and scooping up all the loot from their amusing cooked-carcass remains. You’ll then do all that extraction shooter goodness, like sneaking into abandoned buildings and emptying the cupboards, daring to head a little further each time. The key point is, the game very carefully doesn’t overwhelm you at first, but subtly ramps up those earliest areas once you’re ready to cope. You’re motivated by those early quests, like finding a flat-head screwdriver to fix the local radio tower, but also by that far more powerful drive: revenge. If a group of ducks took you down last time, well, first you’ll want to return to that spot because you’ve got one chance to recover everything you died carrying, but you’ll also want to wipe the smiles off their beaks right away.
And then the loop has its webbed claws into you. Soon you’ll be adding new stations to your base, letting you craft better health items, weapons, and various other elements essential for crafting the next thing on the compelling list. And each of those stations have upgrade paths themselves. Friendly ducks you meet will end up moving in to run some stations, such as a gym or a weapon-modification store, each with their own quests to give you. Everything you add adds more, becomes another to-do list of improvements to loot for, and drives you to be ever-more brave on your expeditions.
Holding you back are two elements: nighttime and the Storm. The former is fairly easily dealt with: you can either brave the far more dangerous world, or just go to bed and wait for morning. The latter happens every few hundred in-game hours, and at first just makes the outside world inaccessible for a while (it’s a good chance to get busywork done, or you can just sleep past it). But only at first, because of course this too is an opportunity for progression as you start to seek out a means to survive the purple mists.
That’s the core of why Escape from Duckov is so great, and so successful: it just keeps expanding its scope as you increase your ability to survive, and this loop is so wonderfully compulsive. Of course, this also means that the risk inherent in your run grows so much more, as you head off in your best suit of armor and carrying your finest guns, only to get walloped a few feet from a previously undiscovered extraction point. Then you have to decide, do I risk the exact same super-dangerous run again to recover it all, but this time—you know—without all the equipment you’re trying to rescue? Or do you give it up as heartbreakingly lost, shake it off, and rebuild? (The latter, by the way, is generally the smarter option. I always pick the former.)
So for as silly as it looks, and as daftly as it’s named, this isn’t a goof. This is a fantastic and superbly crafted game that continuously draws you further in like falling down a spiral. There’s a really good reason it’s already sold a million copies in its first week since launch. Extraordinarily, for a single-player game, it’s currently the fifth-most played game on Steam, ahead of even Rust and Delta Force, peaking at over a quarter of a million simultaneous players just yesterday. It also has an extraordinary 96-percent positive rating on Steam from nearly 15,000 reviews.
And yes, it has me completely hooked. I’m writing this so late in my day because I didn’t want to stop playing and get on with my job. I’m going right back to it now that I’m done. And it’s hard to give a game more credit than that.
