Duck Game

I came into Duck Game expecting a throwaway party gimmick and left with a bruised ego and forty minutes of unplanned overtime. The pitch is deceptively simple: up to four players drop into a tiny 2D arena, every weapon on the map is a one-hit kill, last duck standing scores a point, repeat until someone wins the round. Matches clock in at somewhere between five and thirty seconds. There is no respawn timer, no shield mechanic, no TTK curve to memorize. You pick up a gun, you shoot the nearest duck, you die to a saxophone, you are back in fifteen seconds. At 144hz it is silky smooth and the input lag is negligible, which matters more than you might expect when a shotgun blast to the face is the difference between first and last place in the span of a single frame. The weapon roster is where this thing earns its reputation. There are over fifty options on the table, from basic revolvers and shotguns to Net Guns that immobilize opponents, Mind Control Rays that turn enemy ducks against their own team, Magnet Guns that yank weapons out of hands, and the legendary chainsaw, which you can rev up and ride along the ground at high speed as both transport and shredder. Weapon interactions are the real depth here: throw a gun into fire and the heated ammo starts cooking off randomly, use a revolver recoil to push an opponent off a ledge, arc grenade launcher shots over cover. None of this is in a tutorial. You learn it by dying to it and then immediately doing it back. The single-player arcade mode is a tiered challenge gauntlet with bronze, silver, and gold criteria. It functions as a disguised tutorial and it does that job competently, but it is not a reason to buy this game on its own. The difficulty spikes are inconsistent, some objectives are unclear, and the mode stops being interesting roughly fifteen minutes after it stops being useful. The level editor is also in here, and while it is basic, Steam Workshop fills the gap with community maps that have been accumulating since 2015. The peer-to-peer netcode is the one legacy compromise you feel occasionally, especially in lobbies with players across continents, but for regional groups it holds up fine. The harder question is whether the online population in 2025 can keep a lobby full. Concurrent numbers are modest compared to peak years, but Discord communities and Steam groups still organize regular sessions, and Remote Play Together means you can draft a friend who does not even own the game. This is fundamentally a couch game that also works online, not the other way around. If you have three people in the same room with controllers, it does not matter what year it is. The chaos is consistent, the rounds are short enough that nobody rage-quits, and the game has been under active solo developer care with publisher rights now back in the developer's hands after a 2024 delisting scare that turned out fine.

Fred · Scout Team

Shooters

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