Door Kickers 2 Review (ChiliBun)
Door Kickers? More like A ss Kickers.
"I need my Door Kickers... Two"
The first thing I will say is that I DO recommend this game. However! That comes with a huge asterisk.
The game is very very fun initially and it feels morelike a puzzle game than a milsim in all of the best ways. The mechanics are fun, responsive, engaging and definitely keep your brain locked in as you slowly figure out a map and plan the best way to approach the objective and solve the milsim flavoured rubix cube. I've had a blast figuring out what gear to equip my units with, and how to approach missions in fun and creative ways. The world feels well made, the maps are super fun and genuinely always find a way to force you to think outside the box.
It isn't until a few hours in that you notice some of the missions have subtle variations which means that the finely crafted Rube Goldberg machine - you've crafted out of corner-pies, flashbang tosses, mandated reloads, and a lot of right click, line-of-sight adjustments - completely falls apart. Wait since when did a third guy spawn in that room? Why has that door not been kicked open? How am I supposed to complete this mission using one plan if the mission isn't repeatable and predictable?
And that is the crux of why this game makes me totally pull my hair out. The game desperately wants you to completely plan a mission ahead of time using a fine process of constant inching forward with trial-and-error but the random variables changing on the fly can completely obfuscate that goal. I've genuinely completed a mission at three stars by just hitting space over and over until I got the right seed for that particular run.
I'm sure there are people reading this with a white-knuckled fist "Sk... SK... SKILL ISSUE BRUH" and the fact of the matter is that the difference of a mission winning or losing being down to luck is genuinely nothing to do with skill. Like I said earlier - I DO ENJOY THIS GAME AND I DO RECOMMEND IT but I've seen a massive lack of discourse surrounding this one element of the game that truly frustrates me. I can't help but wonder if the devs included it so that one can't look up "Mission 11 - Solved - All Three Goals" on YouTube or whatever and I get that, but when you punish those who have assumed they discovered the solution to a mission just to have a third guy spawn in the wrong room on this particular attempt? That feels incredibly bad.
Another thing to mention is that maybe I'm just bad at the game but... I've definitely noticed that sometimes my team will just outright stare a insurgent directly in the face, gun drawn, mag full, round chambered, no prior tasks assigned - and then just stand there and let the enemy just absolutely magdump them in the face for (what seems to be) absolutely no reason.
Also, also (P.S. P.S. if you prefer) not being able to stack commands on the same turn and lacking a lot of tools to make a proper coherent formation of attacking and controlling a zone can take you out the action sometimes. I understand there are probably limitations in the games engine or what-have-you but after spending hundreds of hours in Ready Or Not, Ground Branch, and other such milsim games you really hope to execute something quite of that calibre and greater in a tactical game just to find out that you kinda... can't.
Just to make this a proper compliment sandwich I will end the review by saying that I have managed to play 10.4 hours of this game in a single day I genuinely adore it and I see myself spending a lot more hours in it for sure. I may even come back to this review in a hundred hours with the same white-knuckled fist some of you have - having a lot more experience and game-sense under my belt. Just know that people a lot less patient than me will be totally put off by the negatives I posted above.
I can't wait to see a lot more of what this game has to offer with things like 2 alternative squads to play as, campaigns, the map maker, and other community levels for sure. It looks amazing and feels great to play, I just wish that it wasn't so... outright unfair sometimes.