escape from duckov first impressions

Escape From Duckov is a singleplayer extraction shooter game by developer Team Soda and published by bilibili. I had never played an extraction shooter before, for the reason that I generally don't enjoy PvP experiences in video games and pretty much all extraction shooters I had previously seen were PvP games, so I was interested in seeing what the genre was about. Another thing that caught my interest was that it was similar to a game idea I had been wanting to make but never got around to. Oh, and it was a twin stick shooter. I'm a sucker for those.

As a short aside, I know it's been a while since I've last written in this blog. I'm happy to say that I've recently started work on a new game called dosimeter and I hope to start writing about that soon. That said, I don't want to just post about development. I want to start posting my thoughts on videogames again, so I'm going to try to do that more regularly, starting with this one.

I really enjoyed Duckov, completing my first playthrough on December 5, 2025 with all achievements attained in 69 hours and 21 minutes on Survival difficulty. There were three major things I enjoyed: The way the game builds tension, how it manages to keep guns interesting, and the pressure of profitability.

The basic loop of the game involves leaving your base, scavenging for as many resources as you can carry, and then extracting. Since you lose all of your stuff when you die, the anxiety and stress you feel is ratcheted up as you get more and more valuable items until you extract and feel a release of that tension. It's a very rewarding loop that makes you feel like you're getting away with murder when you successfully extract, which encourages you to go out on another run right away. I happened to be struggling with anxiety when I was playing Duckov, so it was also a convenient excuse for me to incorrectly assign the source of my anxiety to Duckov as a way to make it feel like I could actively do something about it.

The guns you receive are also surprisingly relevant throughout the entire game, as damage is greatly affected by the kind of ammo you use. There's even a series of quests which ask you to use a very early-game weapon to kill late-game enemies. I really like how they managed to balance the game and give many weapons unique aspects that still make them desirable to use at the end of the game. My favorite loadout happened to be an assault rifle of some kind, like the StG 77A3 or the Flaming AK-47, and the MP-155 Ultima.

However, going out on every run with the best equipment every time is not always the best decision. Not only can you lose all of your stuff, but resupplying can be really expensive. It's not always a great idea to bring the best ammo with you when you go back to an earlier area in the game, since you are unlikely to gain more money than you are going to spend repairing, resupplying, and replacing worn out equipment.

This pressure to be profitable makes the game more interesting to engage with, since it gives you more variables to actively think about before you leave your base and it keeps many pieces of equipment relevant. Unfortunately, this effect is less pronounced for things like armor and medkits, which is a shame. I found that once you got could reliably procure a better version of these items, you never really had much reason to go back.

There were some things about Duckov that I really disliked. Duckov doesn't really have much of a story. You might say that it doesn't need one, but if it's a parody game or a silly game I would at least like it to be funny. The story and lore ends up existing just to justify why things are the way they are in the game and appears to be devoid of humor, plot, or character development. There is neither emotional storytelling nor raucous laughter to be had here. It's just tightly designed gameplay.

Some moments in the game felt really grindy. On my first playthrough, there were very many instances of pawning a rare valuable item or killing a boss right before getting a quest, upgrade, or black market order that requires it. This meant that I had to retread my steps and do what I did again, sometimes many times. It encourages you to just start hoarding your items as much as possible since you don't know when the game will ask you for that item, but the inventory management in the game is unfortunately rather crude. You end up spending a lot of time scrolling through your warehouse to sell things you have too many of so you can free up more space, which is a boring inventory management task.

Some late-game items are also very rare and necessary for certain upgrades. I spent many, many runs going back to J-Lab to find Crystal Filtration Units, an item that just seemed to refuse to spawn. I didn't really have anything else to do but hunt for that item, so this was frustrating for me.

Death can also be very painful. While it is a necessary part of building tension in the gameplay loop, it sometimes means you lose access to a piece of equipment or an item that you cannot procure easily.

This is especially frustrating when encountering a new part of the game you don't know anything about yet. For example, in order to access the Storm Area you need to go through many time-consuming steps in order to acquire a specific consumable pass. The area itself also requires you to have certain equipment or items that let you ignore environment effects present there, but there isn't an obvious way to know ahead of time whether or not your equipment is sufficient. So, I went to the Storm Area underprepared and immediately died to the environment before I could activate the beacon which would allow me to travel back to this area without having to go through all the steps again to procure the consumable pass.

The end of the game feels very sparse. Up until the end of the game, you have too many quests to do. At first, I found this a little overwhelming, but it was nice to have some direction and nudges to go to different areas of the map and experience different things. It felt like there was always something to do. In contract, once you reach a certain point, the quests suddenly thin out and you're left feeling like the end of the game wasn't given as much attention as the rest. It feels empty, as if you're not really supposed to get there.

Overall, I like the game a lot. However, these aspects of the game that I dislike make it fall short of being great, which makes it's hard for me to feel like recommending this game to others. It's a lot of fun, sure, but in the end there doesn't seem to be anything in particular that is really special or meaningful about it. Though, if you're into twin stick shooters like I am, you'll probably enjoy it.