Escape From Duckov might look like a parody, but it's a full-fledged, full-featured singleplayer bottling of extraction shooter juice

I thought Escape From Duckov was a bit. The animal-themed parody game is a model with a long history: Often free-to-play, typically packed with animal puns, and generally suffering from a faint sense that the joke started to wear thin for everyone involved a long time ago.

But despite how Escape From Duckov presents itself, it actually doesn't waste much time on duck material. Yes, almost every NPC is some type of waterfowl, and yes, enemies quack when they notice you. But aside from an occasional duck egg consumable, there's not much duck humor going on at all.

In fact, you don't even really have to play as one: The duck customization options give you all the tools to craft a different bird entirely. Or a sort of Fall Guys-esque bean man. Or Heihachi from Tekken.

Maybe the developers at Team Soda, an internal game studio of Chinese media platform Bilibili, just love ducks—or maybe Duckov's theme was just a bit of canny buzz marketing. If it was, I'm glad I fell for the bait. Under its deceptive meme game veneer, Escape From Duckov is an excellent topdown shooter that smartly repackages the extraction shooter in a satisfying singleplayer format.

You might, as some of my PC Gamer peers have, immediately ask whether a singleplayer game can really be an extraction shooter. To that, I'd answer that the extraction shooter heads among you have just been playing PvP roguelikes this whole time. There's no reason the core tension of an extraction shooter—of risking your hard-won kit in pursuit of cooler gear—shouldn't work in singleplayer, and Escape From Duckov proves the theory.

Quacktical

It helps that Duckov is a damn good top-down shooter. It nails the tension of creeping through hostile territory with a limited sight cone, never knowing whether the crates and cover ahead might be masking a duck with a fully-loaded shotgun.

Swinging my weapon around has a pleasant balance between weight and responsiveness: Because taking aim is never so immediate that it's inconsequential, positioning and situational awareness are important when sweeping a camp of duck militia.

There's plenty of toothy (beaky?) mechanics involved in Duckov gunplay, too. Guns can be equipped with an assortment of tiered attachments and loaded with different ammo types, affecting their effective ranges, recoils, shot grouping, armor penetration, "movement coefficients," and more. Finding a gun that can be loaded out to fit my personal tastes feels like a real prize—which makes it all the more painful when I find myself outmatched in a gunfight after pushing my luck.

There are plenty of typical extraction shooter trappings here: You're accompanied by a pooch who can safeguard a single item that you'll hold onto when you're killed. Between runs, you can put the miscellaneous junk you've collected to use in building base facilities, crafting items, upgrading vendors, and completing quests.

But where quests and missions in other extraction shooters can feel arbitrary or perfunctory, Duckov's questgivers make for a more directed sense of progression. Their objectives gradually introduce new extensions of the crafting and vendor economy, guiding me towards different map regions as my expeditions steadily progress deeper into enemy territory.

Longer term quests, meanwhile, provide some helpful structure when I might otherwise might be tempted towards aimlessly repeating runs to add more junk to my growing storage hoard. Stockpiling more rifles might feel reassuring, but it'll only do so much for me while the black-feathered mercenary commander Pato Chapo remains unkilled.

It's not without its frustrations. On more than one occasion, I've accepted a quest asking me to collect some electronic scrap or medical equipment I'd sold just minutes earlier, having had no way to know it was something rare or worth keeping. Other times, I've extracted from a run to discover the item I'd assumed was worth double what I'd dropped to make room for it was actually worth pennies.

Thankfully, Duckov's got Steam Workshop support, and there's already a respectable library of UI tweaks and mods to give some extra info when I'm debating whether a cabinet's contents is worth making backpack space for. That said, because so much of Duckov's player base is Chinese, it's not always immediately clear what kind of mod I'm looking at, but that's the price you pay for being anglophonic.

As for the duck stuff: I barely notice it. And when I do, it's because it's kind of delightful to see a mallard with a submachinegun walking around with a slight physics-y wobble. I'm happy to take an occasional duck over another serving of generic tacticool grunge.

Speaking as someone who loves a good roguelike but always bounced off the notion of losing my loot to a multiplayer murder (my competitive shooter synapses were shorted out by critical amounts of Call of Duty in my late teens), Escape From Duckov puts the extraction shooter in terms I understand. I get it now. I've tasted the juice, and the juice is good. The ducks are alright.

Now I just have to figure out how to get my favorite rifle back after eating a sniper round on my last looting run.