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Don’t let Escape from Duckov’s cute characters trick you out of a tough looter-shooter
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Ana Diaz
Developed by Team Soda and published by Bilibili, Escape from Duckov is a tough-as-nails single-player top-down looter-shooter game. I previewed it at Gamescom 2025 as part of a private session with the developers. Overall, the preview gave me the chance to play a tough game that will likely appeal to people looking for an intense but silly looter-shooter.
Those familiar with the hit game, Escape from Tarkov, might immediately draw the connection between it and Escape from Duckov because of its name. As it turns out, this duck adventure is not affiliated with the hit game. A representative of Team Soda told me that the game is not a licensed spin-off, but is inspired by it.
“We created this game because the developer team really loved [Escape from Tarkov],” a representative of the game said.
Escape from Tarkov is a multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video game with a realistic art style. This duck game is a top-down shooter that features a gritty and cartoonish art style. Escape from Tarkov is known for its end-of-season wipes that clear player progress, a gameplay feature that Escape from Duckov doesn’t carry over. All in all, the two play pretty differently, but Duckov does contain the tough-as-nails difficulty and survival game mechanics that players would associate with Escape from Tarkov.
“The producer used to play thousands of hours of Escape from Tarkov, but he thought that the game is really hardcore,” a representative of the game said. “You feel high pressure in the game, so that [alienates] a lot of players. So he wanted to bring the essence of the experience to other players.”
The game starts off with a bang, and it’s still pretty difficult even at the start. I played the game on the second-easiest difficulty level, and the tutorial level grunts could kill me in just two attacks. I had to get the hang of rolling and dodging early on so that I could move my character close enough to them to hit an enemy with my baton. (In these moments, I found the game’s key art that depicts a crying duck running for its life a little bit too relatable.)
I scavenge various rooms in this twisting underground complex and eventually find a gun in a crate. Getting my first ranged weapon made the game a lot easier, but even then, I had to make sure I loaded up the right ammo and managed my shots carefully since I had such a limited amount of ammo. Once I completed the surprisingly difficult tutorial, I arrived at an underground bunker that serves as my duck’s base.
There, I can construct furniture to upgrade my duck and craft new kinds of items. The main point of the game is to go out and collect resources so that you can return to your base and upgrade your character and its items. The basic gameplay loop is pretty straightforward and pretty easy to understand, even if the game itself is difficult. I exit the base, explore the surrounding area, and then defeat and loot enemy camps. From there, I can either teleport back to my base or hoof it back on palmate to bring my newly looted resources back to camp.
As I journey out into the larger overworld, I find new challenges that add even more difficulty to the game. I need to manage bars like stamina and my duck’s thirst. That, combined with an inventory that only allows for a few items at the start, made me aware of every decision and the ways I used each and every item. At one point, I found myself chugging loads of milk just so I could make room for wood to take back to my base.
I found it to be a more approachable experience than Escape from Tarkov, even though I found it difficult. Features like the ability to tweak the difficulty of the game and a quick onramp made it a relatively easy game to jump into the world of the game. In the end, it might have been a bit tougher than the kind of game I’d usually play, but these waddling ducks are tough enough to make it through the toughest survival scenario.
Escape from Duckov will be released on MacOS and Windows PC. You can wishlist it now on Epic Games Store.
