"You rang?"
Door Kickers is a real-time tactical SWAT simulator with free pause from KillHouse Games. In it, you take control of a SWAT team and fight your way through meth-cooking apartments, hostage-littered office locales and pimped out drug lord yachts, all using a combination of real-time maneuvres and intricate planning while paused. You can choose between single missions of various difficulty or several campaigns with tiered missions and full, XP-driven squad control. Everything is top-down, extremely intuitive and it's a hoot to play.
"Oh. So you meant 1, 2, 3 then go?"
Now, there are a few drawbacks to the near-perfect execution of the UI. Setting up multiple actions linked to each other can sometimes be a hassle, or downright impossible depending on what you're trying to do. At times, it can also be hard to tell if a wait command (where a cop is told to wait for either an all clear or a call sign) will be triggered before, after or during a certain action. For example, setting up a chain of events for a trooper to reach a closed door, kick it in, throw a flashbang grenade and then wait for a call sign before entering, might as well see him reaching the door and then just stand there waiting for the call sign. The real problem being that it's not always clear which way it will play out in advance, leaving you second-guessing yourself at times. It is, however, a minor drawback considering how well the controls work through the minimalistic (in a good way) interface most of the time, and it's also understandable. The game was clearly made with tablets in mind, and a simple interface is almost a must for that market.
Speaking of tablets, I'm not an avid tablet user, but I have taken the time to test the game on one, and it works like a charm. I didn't have the patience to try everything out, but it felt like a solid tablet experience for those who enjoy that kind of thing. The path dragging is perfect for a touch screen and being able to set up pretty much everything using nothing more than your fat thumb means that the game is a delight to play on the PCs twice removed cousins.
Pictured here.
Apart from the many, many well designed single missions available (last time I counted there were 70+ missions to choose from), the game also offers six campaigns. The campaigns are multi-branched and consist of several missions tied together by an overarching story. This would be the true soul of the game, were it not for the weird decision to have squad members involved in the campaign locked until the campaign is resolved, making it difficult to switch back and forth between playing a campaign and single missions. If you start a campaign, you better complete it right away or be prepared to become very frustrated the next time you want to play a quick mission. It's also not made very clear to the player that even with Iron Man Mode turned off, campaigns employ permadeath. All in all, this has kept me from enjoying the campaigns as much as I would have liked to.
Instead, to me, the meat of the game is in the way you level up your squad. There are several classes to choose from, all with various skills and choice of equipment, and you can change names and portraits of all squad members. The game employs an XP system, and you're able to choose skills for both individual members and the squad as a whole as you progress, and XP is gained both for campaigns and single missions. This is the sort of stuff I live for, and thanks to how mod-friendly the game is, it's possible to tailor your squad to your liking, down to things like custom portraits and badges.
If I can't name something after myself, I'm not playing.
The game also comes with a mission editor and support for the Steam Workshop, so you're unlikely to run out of things to do anytime soon. I have yet to try the mission editor, but considering the high quality of some of the player made missions I have downloaded I can only assume that it's pretty solid.
With all that being said, I still think that it's a game for an acquired taste. I would strongly recommend getting it as long as you enjoy top-down tactical shooters like Jagged Alliance or squad managing games like XCOM, but if you lean more towards fast-paced FPS games, you may not enjoy this title as much. But for me, it's one of my favorite indie titles of the last couple of years and I keep coming back to it. I find that one of the greatest strengths of Door Kickers is how it's the perfect setup for a quick game before you have to be somewhere else. If you have just five minutes to kill, a single mission of your choosing is the way to do it.
Also, check out my Let's Play Videos of the game by clicking on the links below, or just head on over to the Let's Play section found here. Until then, this is Johnny Panzer, signing out.
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