Door Kickers: Action Squad

Door Kickers: Action Squad is a side-scrolling action game built around tactical room-clearing. You pick a specialist, stack up on a door, and push through procedurally arranged levels filled with hostage takers, bombs, and a generous variety of ways to get shot in the face. The pixel art is deliberately retro, the sound design punchy, and the moment-to-moment loop is closer to a fast-reaction arcade game than a slow-burn planner. If you came in expecting the top-down deliberate pacing of the original Door Kickers, reset your expectations - this one rewards reflexes as much as positioning. The class roster is where the depth lives. You have archetypes like the Assaulter, the Shield Operator, and the Breacher, each with distinct weapon loadouts, passive perks, and active abilities that change how you approach a room. The Assaulter sprays suppressive fire and pushes aggression; the Shield op turtles through choke points and protects a co-op partner. Mixing two classes in co-op - either couch or online - opens genuine tactical wrinkles. A Shield plus a Breacher combo turns hallways into very one-sided conversations. Solo play is completely viable but noticeably harder on later missions, which is honest game design rather than artificial co-op gating. Progression is level-based with a star rating system per mission, and chasing three stars on harder difficulties is where the replay value actually sits. Each mission has modifiers - time pressure, no-kill bonuses, hostage survival requirements - that force you to adapt your approach rather than brute-force the same entry point repeatedly. The level design gets legitimately clever in the mid-game, stacking multiple threat vectors in tight corridors. AI enemies are predictable by design in a way that feels fair rather than braindead: they patrol, react to noise, and occasionally flank, which is exactly the right difficulty ceiling for a co-op arcade game without pretending to be Rainbow Six. On the downside, the game is short if you ignore the star-chasing meta. A casual player burning through missions without replaying for ratings will see the content in a weekend. The mod ecosystem on PC extends that lifespan considerably - community-built missions add meaningful hours - but the base game's campaign is not sprawling. The tutorial is minimal: it shows you controls and trusts you to learn class synergies by dying, which works fine for experienced action players but may frustrate anyone who wants explicit guidance on optimal loadout builds. There is also no meaningful meta-progression between runs, so if you want unlockable gear trees or persistent character upgrades, that feature set simply is not here. For what it sets out to be - a tight, replayable, co-op-first arcade brawler with a tactical skin - Action Squad delivers cleanly. The 95% positive Steam rating across ten-thousand-plus reviews is not an accident. It is the kind of game that earns word-of-mouth because it respects your time per session, runs on modest hardware, and is genuinely better with a friend on the couch. Go in with calibrated expectations, grab a co-op partner if you can, and work toward three-starring the harder missions rather than just clearing the campaign once.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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