The Indie Informer

Parody games walk a very fine line. On one hand, a game that’s made exclusively as a play on another game needs to be funny and in conversation with the game it’s poking fun at; however, it also needs to be a competent game in its own regard or risk being nothing more than a surface-level joke. While I can’t speak to how well Escape From Duckov is as an obvious parody of Escape From Tarkov, I was happy to discover that Duckov is a solid extraction shooter/crafting/base-building game that has some really great hooks despite the silly face the game is making.

I’ve never played Escape From Tarkov. My understanding is that it’s a tense PvPvE extraction shooter that asks players to heavily lock in as they explore remnants of a war-torn city. Escape From Duckov doesn’t seem to share much DNA with Tarkov aside from its name and genre. Duckov is a top-down PvE extraction crafting game more geared towards basebuilding and incremental progression as opposed to flexing your twitch-shooting muscles. Because of its heavy emphasis on base-building through the acquisition of resources over its combat elements, I found the experience to be more comparable to the likes of Valheim and Dysmantle (two of the games in the genre that I’ve spent the most time with).

There’s something really satisfying about Escape From Duckov’s crafting loop. You start each run from your home base and venture out into the wilderness in search of wood and gun parts and scrap metal, all while managing your hunger and thirst meters. It’s a pretty standard survival/crafting loop; however, I really appreciate the scarcity balance Escape From Duckov has. Each run feels like you get to the end by the skin of your teeth (or perhaps “beak” is more appropriate.) Specific crafting resources aren’t so scarce that the game feels like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but aren’t so plentiful that finding what you’re looking for isn’t a big deal.

Balancing scarcity is a difficult thing to get right and is a common hurdle that other games of Duckov’s ilk can struggle to manage, so in my first few runs, I was happy to see that Escape From Duckov isn’t just a parody game. It’s actually invested in being a solid entry in the genre while also poking fun at common tropes.

I found the game’s combat balance to be less fine-tuned. Enemy AI is extremely basic and, while I appreciate varying things up by adding multiple enemy types dependent on their weapons and the like, most enemies were easily defeated in just a few shots with a handgun. As soon as I got my hands on a rifle, combat became even more trivial.

Despite the simple combat, I’m not so sure Escape From Duckov is trying to be some fantastic shooter. It feels like the focus of the combat is far less interested in being challenging in itself, but instead puts a focus on being another obstacle wearing you down in the way of extracting with crafting resources. I view the combat in a similar way to the hunger and thirst mechanics: these are systems in place that put pressure on you to make choices. Each mechanic can be easily dealt with in optimal circumstances, but more often than not, you’re patching up problems by putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound.

Escape From Duckov isn’t bringing anything radically different to the table in terms of the survival-crafting, extraction genre, but instead, the game is interested in refinement. Duckov is balanced well and pushes the player to make meaningful choices in each run. As crafting quests and side quests require resources in more plentiful numbers, runs get more and more frantic, and in turn, the choices the game pushes you to make become even more meaningful.

On top of all that, you get to play as a duck and – really – what more do I need to say?