• Developer: Landon Podbielski

• Publisher: Adult Swim Games

• Where to buy?: Steam

Sadly today in this day and age many game developers are afraid to try new things. You see this with the same game being released yearly, at a premium price point with very few improvements. Games such as Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed, and Madden ring a bell. Sadly with the costs of making a AAA title, many just will not take the chance on a new project or concept at the risk of the game failing. Sadly just one game can bankrupt a company, so as a business you see less innovative titles on the market. Thankfully however, many developers are now making “indie” games. These are games with a very small team and budget, that try to deliver innovative gameplay at a reasonable price point. One of these games is Duck Game.

Duck Game is a 4 player shoot-em up styled arcade brawler. Your goal is to kill all the other ducks while staying alive to receive a point. The first to 10 points is the winner. While a simple concept, the results you can have are hilarious and downright silly. With weapons such as duck nets, grenades, shotguns, sniper rifles, and cap guns just to name a few, you have a wide variety of weapons to choose from. The joy of Duck game is getting your friends together and having a 4 player brawl. However, there is one thing that makes Duck Game better than the rest: the quack button.

Yes, Duck Game has a quack button. All this button does is quack. This may sound stupid and silly, but when playing with friends this becomes absolutely hilarious at times. At the end of every game there will be replays of the games highlights, including the quacks. This can lead to some great laughs, and cringe worthy moments as you quack right before you are caught in a net. Duck Game originally launched on the OUYA in 2014 and was a well received game, however due to the OUYA’s less than stellar sales, not many people know of this hidden gem. Thankfully, Adult Swim Games and Landon made the choice to port the game to steam and for good reason. The game is just fun. The stupid kind of fun. I can play this game with my friends for hours straight and not get bored. When playing this for review, my friends and I would just sit and quack telling stories. Stupid yes, but funny to us, and that alone is more than most AAA games that cost 60 bucks can do.

Visually the game is a 8-bit style NES game, which I feel works for this style of game. The sprites are easy to see, and with the various stages, you can use the environment to your advantage in some sections, playing dead and fooling your opponent into passing by you, allowing you to kick back up and shoot him in the face, followed by a quack attack, lowering their morale or angering them, your choice. As far as the audio, I adore the duck quack. By far my favorite part of the game. It adds so much to any situation just being able to kill someone and quack like a maniac. Minus that, you have some pretty catchy tunes, but nothing that you will be humming in the car, or at work.

Overall for the price of Duck Game, I can’t recommend this one enough if you have friends over and are looking for a game that is very easy to play, but offers hours of fun. If you have friends over that are not that into games, try giving Duck game a shot. I think they will have a blast with it, and for $10 USD at the time of this review I cannot think of a better value for a party game. Hopefully a console port could be made, cause I feel that would be a load of fun and a good fit on the PS4 console at the very least.

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