New multiplayer survival game features crafting, base building, automatic weapons and flying. The twist? Everyone plays as a bunch of ducks

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Just when you think you've seen every variation of survival game imaginable, along comes a game like Duckside. Developed by Tinybuild Riga, Duckside is a multiplayer survival sim in the style of Rust and DayZ, only everyone plays as a duck.

"Over 10 million ducks get killed per year by hunters, a statistic that would be much lower if ducks were combat trained," states the game's Steam page. "Enter Duckside, a persistent world survival game like DayZ or Rust… but you’re a duck, and so is everybody else."

As reported by IGN, Duckside is developed by Tinybuild Riga, and aims to offer a familiar blend of resource gathering, tool and weapon crafting, base-building, and open ended combat against human NPCs and other player ducks.

Beyond the novelty value of its player characters (which, let's face it, represents 90% of this game's raison d'etre) the most interesting wrinkle here is that being a duck means that you can fly around the map from the start. Such freedom of movement could add a fresh dynamic to Rust-style survivalism. Granted, you can fly in Rust too, but only after you've built a helicopter, which isn't easy in a game where you start off hitting rocks with a smaller rock.

The announcement was accompanied by a trailer, which you can view above, as well as a second video titled 'basics of survival' that shows off some resource gathering and base construction. Frankly, I'd say 'basic' is the operative word here. The flying looks half-decent, but actions like pecking trees and rocks for resources seem rudimentary in their implementation, while the environment is hardly the most eye-catching survival wilderness I've seen.

Indeed, despite the game having its own Steam page, I'm not wholly convinced this isn't an extremely elaborate April Fool. Then again, Tinybuild has another game in the works titled Pigeon Simulator so making a survival game about ducks isn't wildly beyond the studio's remit.

Duckside doesn’t have a release date yet, but you can find out more about the game here. When it does release, you can be sure it'll be up against some stiff competition. This year has already been huge for survival games, with Palworld and Enshrouded enjoying enormously successful launches, and Sons of the Forest sucking the last dregs of marrow from the bone of Steam Early Access. Maybe Duckside has more surprises hidden under its wing. Or maybe Tinybuild will end up facing a hefty bill. We'll find out in due course.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.