Escape From Duckov is silly, entertaining and worth grabbing if you don't mind the grind

A single-player extraction shooter with ducks? Escape From Duckov is quite silly, but it works and most importantly it's entertaining to play. Note: a key was provided to GamingOnLinux.

What is it? It's a top-down extraction shooter featuring silly-looking cartoony ducks. Even the world you're on is shaped like an egg, which is slowly falling apart. You customize a duck, and then set out to try and escape the planet by eventually crafting a rocket. It has a mixture of action, exploration and crafting / base-building.

The name is of course a play on Escape from Tarkov, and so you could be forgiven if you thought this was some sort of parody but the reality is they're barely anything alike aside from the very basic extraction idea where you have to exit the map. This is a much more casual game (but still challenging), and single-player. A lot closer to ZERO Sievert than Tarkov, but more chilled.

The idea is to provide an extraction shooter that's a bit more suitable to a wider audience, with a friendlier theme and I think it's a full success on that. Giving you a world to explore and uncover the secrets, with combat that's fun and a little challenging but the game doesn't feel like it punishes you for being a little bit crap.

Customization is almost as much fun as the game itself, allowing you to make the stupidest looking quacker you can imagine. Just look at my beast:

With the addition of base-building, along with needing to find blueprints out in the world to expand what you can build, it gives you plenty to work towards that results in quite a satisfying loop to run around.

The shooting is one of the most important bits of course, this is a top-down shooter at the core of it. And, thankfully, the shooting is actually good, not incredible, but good enough that it will keep you on your toes. The action will often make you scramble so you don't get turned into a meal. The feeling of trying to sneak around, and hearing a quack as you're spotted and suddenly the rush comes in as you don't want to lose all that valuable loot is ace. Especially nice with all the different types of melee and ranged weapons, along with tiers of them and tiers of ammo. There's a lot of content to explore, find and unlock as you go through it.

Like the level system with you gaining XP as you do various tasks, which allows you to boost your little duck with all sorts of goodies. They all come at a cost, but there's a lot there.

And, since it's an extraction shooter - you may be familiar with the mechanic of having a special pocket to keep at least something safe. Here you have that, in the form of a little companion that runs around with you. Good, because it's not without frustrations, the most annoying being losing items or just trying to find what you need and seeing your progress halted as you attempt to get it back. But, it does well on the risk versus reward system here to keep you wanting to push further. It is a complete grind, one that can at times feel quite a bit annoying.

It's nice that it's not just an aimless runaround too, since there's a dedicated quest system to give you a sense of progression and actively guide you through the game. This is not just a do whatever you want exploration and crafting game though, that progression very much gates everything. You need to go through a series of tasks, to be able to actually get anywhere and experience the different maps.

I feel like I'm only scratching the surface a bit on what to tell you about it. There's lots of features that all add together. A day and night cycle for example, where it's more difficult to explore at night but you can skip it by sleeping. When hit you can bleed, which can become a frantic race to get some bandages on, which is especially heart-racing due to the fog of war system while you're exploring. You don't know what's going to be around the corner, and enemies appearing when coming into view did startle me quite a lot at times when I wasn't ready for it.

While the base game has plenty to keep you going for multiple tens of hours, it's the community side of it that has really helped it flourish. The developers actively support modding and playing it your way by adding in new weapons, custom maps, quests and whatever else the community can come up with.

One thing that does let it down is the lack of controller support. This would have been great to kick back and relax with, and I do generally feel more comfortable with this sort top-down shooter with a controller. So hopefully that's something they can eventually work in. Especially so, as it would make a great Steam Deck game too then. And given the controls, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to do with a few UI tweaks. We've seen far more complicated games have full controller support.

This all would have worked just fine without all the ducks, but it's clear the silliness of the ducks that has helped it sell so well. It's a nice hook to pull people in, making it a little different to the crowd. Impressively, the game has sold multiple millions since the October 16th release. As of October 28th, they announced it crossed over 2 million. That's some seriously amazing numbers.

Overall, if you love the structure of roguelikes with a bit of base-building and like the idea of extraction shooters this should be an easy choice for you to pick up.

Works great on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 25.10) with Proton 9. A flawless experience as far as I can tell.

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