Door Kickers hits beta, adds levelling system, improved waypointing, challenges

It's been around a year since we last checked in on Door Kickers, and in that time KillHouse Games' top-down SWAT-like appears to have come on leaps and bounds. It's just reached beta status, words which here mean 'has added a levelling system for your troops, improved waypointing, a challenge system that rewards with XP, oh and this huge list of other stuff'. If you've bought into the game already you've likely received an email by now informing you of the update; for everyone else, the following trailer will clue you in on what you're missing.

Ahead of the full game this autumn—if that's what "final exams this fall" means at the end of the above video—this beta release boasts the aforementioned levelling system, new mission challenges that will help you accrue XP faster, an element of troop customisation, unlockable items and quite a few bug fixes, along with an improved modding system that will make it easier to change the game to your liking. (And that's only around half of the changes mentioned on the site .)

You can find Door Kickers in a variety of places, including Early Access on Steam. Considering the full release is only a few months out, it might be better to wait until then, when reviews will start to appear—but there's a lot here to get stuck into in the meantime, if you're determined to jump the gun.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.