Doorkickers / Killhouse games

Most Played: Doorkickers

Tango down!

19 armed men had taken 10 passengers hostage on a plane and planted a bomb somewhere in the cabin. As we stacked up, ready to blow the door, my mind turned to those 10 men and women being held - it wouldn’t take much for them to catch a stray bullet, or even for their hostage-takers to turn on them. I had already seen what awaited me and my partner on the other side of the airplane’s door: all the hostages and a few of their armed minders. We were going to be walking into to a shitstorm. A whisper came over my headset.“Charges set.” It was go-time. The door blew open with a thump and we pressed into the cabin. The man closest to the door had been laid flat in the blast, and one of his friends stood dazed in the aisle. I raised my carbine and dropped him, moving my sights onto another tango surrounded by unarmed civilians. Behind me, my partner had dashed into the rear galley only to be shot from behind. “Noooo!” I called out in desperation as I let loose on the trigger. “Man down!” I reported, struggling to find my targets in the chaos and acrid smoke. The firefight was a blur, I’d taken a hit to the vest, but the rear cabin was clear, the blood-soaked galley too. As I stepped over my fallen comrade, I could hear more shooting from the other end of the plane, the other two troopers from my element were up against heavy resistance. I moved down the aisle to help them, dodging an ambush in the mid-section. In the forward section of the plane, my comrades-at-arms lay spluttering on the floor, countless bodies and unattended weapons around them. The door opened ahead to a ticking clock - the bomb was staring me in the face, egging me to go on, but I knew that I would be walking into an ambush. I reloaded and then threw my last flashbang. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

The Review

I love SWAT-like games. Adore them. There is something about stacking up beside a door that puts me on edge. You know that you are being funneled into an ambush - but the fun comes from having the tactical wherewithal to tame this wilderness of death.

As a teenager I bought and played every iteration of the Rainbow Six series. I made plans with go-codes and then I let the AI do everything. The fun and excitement came from the puzzle of tackling the hostage situation rather than being the one to pull the trigger.

Playing games like Rainbow Six or Sierra’s SWAT series, puts you on the ground and in command, but occasionally there were games which removed you from the equation. Doorkickers is one of these games.

Commanding an entry team in the current alpha release of Doorkickers is simply a matter of drawing lines of movement like a football coach, setting commands for tackling doors, and occasionally taking direct control over arcs of fire. It sounds simple, and it is, but it doesn’t make it easy.

Doorkickers Alpha 3 introduced a whole range of new levels and game modes.

With a range of buildings to assault and a star-based performance rating, the game offers plenty of variety. There are several game types as well: Clear Hostiles, Hostage Rescue, Bomb Defusal, and my personal favorite, Stop Execution.

Stop Execution gives you one or more hostages with guns to their heads, with an itchy trigger-finger being all that decides whether you succeed or fail. I don’t ever remember playing a game in which hostages would be executed so easily, but it works very well. Whereas I usually approach these games with careful progression, Stop Execution maps turn into a race. Take too long, the hostage dies. Make too much noise, the hostage dies.

I can’t count how many times I have gotten this hostage killed.

It’s this variety and simplicity that will hook you. The Angry Birds approach to rating your performance in the levels gives the whole game the feeling of being a puzzle. A very dynamic puzzle at that. Doorkickers takes the territory of the first-person tactical shooter and distills it almost perfectly into a real-time tactical strategy game.

The controls are intuitive, with a pause button used to help you plan your next action and draw your paths without having to chase a moving target. My only issue at this stage is that the arc of fire command isn’t a toggle - you might ask your men to look right as they go down a corridor, but unless you give the fire sector is given at the end of their path, they will simply just revert to looking forwards a second later. Your only real option is to control their arc of fire manually with the mouse in real-time, but you can only do that for one man at a time. For me, a more permanent solution like that provided in Frozen Synapse makes more sense for beating the constraints of operating in real-time.

At $7.99 for the most basic buy-in to the alpha, you will be getting a game that already feels polished despite currently lacking many of its planned features. They have a demo available on their website should you wish to try before you buy.

Hopefully the developers will manage to bring Doorkickers to the iPad - it’s short level-based gameplay and path-based controls are ideal for a tablet. One of their buy-in tiers (at $15.99) is dedicated to making this happen.

In the meantime, I cannot wait to see how the small Romanian team expands upon their features, but with deployment menus and snipers being worked on, I know we are in for something great.

The Breakdown

Originality:

The game has clear influences from games such as the tactical turn-based strategy game Frozen Synapse, the planning modes of the Rainbow Six series, the hands-off tactical control of the Full Spectrum Warrior series and the setting of the SWAT series. The way it mixes these influences is both novel and effective.

Value:

The game is currently in alpha (release 3) and can be purchased on the Killhouse Games website for $7.99. The game isn’t finished yet, but even at this stage it is clear that you will get plenty for you money.

Entertainment:

I love this game. It is challenging with granular controls and a range of levels that play out more as puzzles than a shooter.It can be frustrating at times when your men are out-gunned, but the fun in the game comes from beating the levels and improving your score.

Replayability:

Short gameplay, varied levels, changing conditions with a time and score to beat? You’ll play this game again and again.