Train your duck to be a champion racer!
The Duck Life games are a series of Adobe Flash and smartphone games by Wix Games. The games follow a farmer and the duck they raise from an egg training by preforming as well as possible in minigames. Once it's been trained enough, it has to race other ducks to beat them.
The series spans eight different games:
- Duck Life (2007)
- Duck Life 2: World Champion (2008)
- Duck Life 3: Evolution (2011)
- Duck Life 4 (2012)
- Duck Life Treasure Hunt (2014)
- Duck Life Space (2016)
- Duck Life Battle (2018)
- Duck Life Adventure (2020)
Tropes:
- Ability Required to Proceed: In Battle and Adventure, you learn abilities like flying and swimming to be able to explore more parts of the map.
- Achievement System: Evolution has ten achievements to unlock for things like getting coins and beating leagues. Removed in the Retro Pack.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: The final race of a section in the first three games uses track parts from the previous races and adds its own to test all three/four of your duck's abilities.
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Beating the races unlocks the ability to buy different hats and colors for your duck.
- Art Evolution: World Champion would start the series giving ducks shading, unlike the original.
- Artistic License – Biology: If you pick the flying-type duck at the beginning of Evolution, its third form is introduced with "Your duck is now a bird"... As if ducks weren't those already.
- Ash Face: In the first game, if your duck falls into the lava at the volcano race stage, the race will end immidiately, and the duck will be changed to black color... for free.
- Bait-and-Switch Boss: Downplayed and Zig-zagged for Adventure: You fight Marco as intended in a battle at first, then your duck's mother suddenly breaks in and engages you in a fight for running away. After defeating her, you continue fighting Marco.
- Bland-Name Product: In the final level of the fourth game, one can spot a "McDuckald's" restaurant.
- Bragging Rights Reward: After beating Evolution, you are rewarded with 500,000 coins. However, the only use of coins in the game is to buy seeds for energy. By the time you've beaten the game, you will have already won all the races and likely maxed out your energy.
- Compilation Re-release: The Retro Pack is a mobile release of the first three DL games with some small improvements like a higher framerate and a new challenge mode.
- Cosmetic Award: Beating the final race of the first game rewards your duck with a crown.
- Difficulty by Acceleration: Almost every minigame gets faster the longer the duck keeps going. It also starts slightly faster depending on its skill level.
- Dump Stat: Energy is necessary at the beginning to even make it to the end of a track, but they are generally not long enough to require too much of it. Space would let you use a speed boost at the cost of some energy, turning the stat into something always worth raising.
- Evolutionary Levels: Your duck evolves twice throughout Evolution based on what type you picked, gaining more body features, a better skillset, and +50 to its level cap. It evolves to its ultimate form at the 3rd.
- Final Boss, New Dimension: The final race in Evolution takes place in a purple dimension of some kind.
- Gravity Screw: The first Gravity minigame in Space requires you to flip gravity so the duck doesn't collide into a wall.
- Informed Species: The ducklings look more like chicks than actual baby ducks. Mainly because of the beak and the fact that the player's duckling is yellow by default in early games.
- Interactive Start Up: The title screen of the first game features a duck whose face will follow the cursor.
- Laugh Track: When your duck loses in a race.
- Level Editor: World Champion has a level creator unlocked after beating the game. It turned out to be so glitchy that the developer couldn't fix it, which is why such a feature has not made any appearances in the later games.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Marco, the champion in Adventure, is revealed to be the player's duck's father.
- Minigame Game: The series is mostly comprised of this. You play mini games to train your duck and then watch a race to see if your duck is trained enough to win.
- Money for Nothing: In the first three games, you earn so much money through races that you generally have enough to max the duck's energy level and unlock customisation options, plus beating the final race grants so many coins it's basically impossible to run out.
- My Beloved Smother: The player's duck's mother from Adventure does not want the player's duck to go on an adventure because Marco, her husband, never returns home after he leaves to become the champion.
- New Game Plus: In 2, after starting a new duck after beating the game, the level up caps will be removed and the training will become "extreme" variants that are much harder.
- Never Given a Name: The duck from the first game is unable to be named.
- Retronym: The first game is known as Duck Life Origin in the Retro Pack, to differentiate it from the fourth game which is known on mobile storefronts as just Duck Life.
- Rise to the Challenge: Evolution's climbing game for professional stage has the duck climbing inside a volcano to escape from the lava, though this is just aesthetic; the duck still won't die until they are off the screen.
- Spikes of Doom: Evolution's minigame for advanced swimming has spikes appear as an obstacle. The duck can go above or under them, but landing on them from either side ends the minigame.
- Superboss: An unintentional example in the second game's mobile edition. You beat the game and get a bunch of prizes after beating the Semi Final, rather than the Championship Final, turning the hardest race against the world's fastest duck optional, which you don't even get anything for beating.
- Teleportation: Space has portals put in race tracks. The duck can use them faster depending on its intelligence.
- The Series Has Left Reality: The first two games have relatively grounded-in-reality plotlines for its genre (1 with having a farmer qualify their duck for a world championship race to win enough money to rebuild their farm and 2 with another duck wanting to win the crown of the duck from the first game and become champion), but things get strange to say the least going from Evolution and onward.
- There's No Kill like Overkill: If your duck is fast enough, it can outrun all other ducks by such a wide margin they get disqualified if they don't reach the finish line in time. Heck, they may not even go far enough to show up on the screen by the time the race ends in this manner.
- Ultimate Life Form: Your duck becomes an Ultimate Duck in the last part of Evolution, getting a positive +50% boost in all stats and a well-defined white body. As it turns out, the final opponent is one too, but it has pitch-black skin.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change:
- Downplayed with Evolution, where the final race has you click on obstacles to remove them but otherwise plays like a normal race.
- The final races for 4 and Space has you directly control your duck.
- Virtual Pet: The premise of the series, which is to train up your duck.
- You Have Researched Breathing: A hilarious example exists in Adventure, where one of the guides wonder why you duck can't swim at all despite being a duck. Swimming here is an ability required to be used to cross water terrains.
