Escape From Duckov Review (PC): Worth a Waddle for the Right Type

When you go about searching just about any gaming storefront, you can probably expect to see quite a few joke games now and then. Spoofs on existing and highly popular games and genres. That’s what I was expecting when Escape From Duckov was initially presented to me. Escape From Tarkov but with ducks? Yeah, I could use a laugh. 

Surprisingly, though, this is actually a pretty serious game that doesn’t do much with what appears to be a setup for a joke. Instead, it tries to be the best top-down single-player extraction shooter you could think of. Whether or not you are into that kind of game will really decide if you like it or not.

Multiplayer Isn’t Everything It’s Quacked Up to Be

In Escape From Duckov, you create an abomination of a duck in the character creator and immediately get to work escaping a prison and beginning the endless grind of the extraction shooter formula, though in this game, you only interact with AI enemies. Instead of trying to compete with Tarkov, Duckov is trying to make its own little nest in the genre.

In all honesty, I’m not the biggest fan of extraction shooters. I think they get boring rather quickly, and I definitely felt that quite a bit here as well. In this game, you are continuously trying to gather supplies to build up a base that allows you to upgrade yourself in various ways. That part I enjoyed, as the progression in this game genuinely feels good to go through. Everywhere you go, there are constant places to loot, with many enemies around any corner, making you judge the benefit of pushing forward or extracting when you get the chance. That’s the part that kind of lost me.

While the base holds your progression overall, going out into the world and seeing the same locations continuously got very tiring to me. You will receive various quests to keep track of as you explore, but I never found myself being pushed in a certain direction to complete them. I always just found myself mindlessly exploring and inevitably running into enemies. When you boil it down to that, it felt kind of like I was plowing through adds you would see in a boss fight, but without the big guy to fight at the end.

Controls That Have Not Gone Afowl

While Escape From Duckov is not necessarily the kind of game I personally enjoy, I can definitely see the value in it. First, controlling your duck from a top-down vantage point is actually really nice for this shooter style. You can always hear when there are enemies around, so preparing yourself for the next battle is always on your mind, but the process of fighting never feels bad. There are plenty of guns to get your feathers on, and the process of point and shoot is easy and seamless. Being a more console-focused gamer, I did have some issues with trying to manage my inventory and swapping ammo on the fly by pressing the right key, but for the seasoned PC gamer, that likely shouldn’t be too big a deal.

While playing on the standard difficulty, I never really thought that the game was overchallenging. That said, when you do die, it is always aggravating. There were times I pushed myself further than I should have, ending in a death that makes you drop all of your gear. To reclaim those items, you need to venture back out into the world and find where you died. A simple concept, but if you had a ton of valuables and you don’t remember the exact way back, you may be out of luck because the game doesn’t give you a marker or anything.

Final Verdict

Overall, Escape From Duckov is a game that doesn’t have any jokes aside from the fact that you’re playing as a duck, but anyone who loves extraction shooters will probably enjoy it. All of the basic mechanics are there, alongside a base building progression that feels rewarding to go through. Retreading the same locations continuously can get tiring fast, though. The single-player nature makes this an experience you can shut your mind off to more than its multiplayer predecessors, but that doesn’t mean it’s a calming experience. If you enjoy the grind, this is a game you can take flight to.

Escape From Duckov was reviewed on PC with a code provided by Bilibili.

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