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"Enter the futuristic year of 1984, an age where ducks run wild in a frantic battle for glory."

Duck Game is a 2014 2D platformer shooter fighting game developed by Landon Podbeilski for OUYA, and published on Steam by [adult swim] in 2015. It is built around fast-paced fighting across stages that give little time for everyone to understand what does what, with different levels providing varied challenges, along with many weapons with their own particular quirks.

Alongside the multiplayer mode, there is also a set of single-player challenges that serve as a means of unlocking additional hats and modifiers, as well as allowing you to get used to the finer subtleties of the game, such as sliding to get through tight spaces or break windows, or taking on multiple targets at once.

Aside from the aforementioned Steam port, the game was also released for Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch in 2019.

Not to Be Confused with Untitled Goose Game.


Duck Game contains examples of:

  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: Or hats, to be exact.
  • Armor-Piercing Attack: Certain weapons, such as the revolver and the sniper rifle, can pass through boxes and doors that would block most other bullets.
    • For a more literal example, the Death Ray and Plutonian Blaster, as well as anything producing fire, will kill armor-wearing ducks.
  • Backwards-Firing Gun: There is one inspired by the Suicide Gun image manipulation. Naturally, using it kills its user and it's often hard to tell from the normal revolver due to the small size of the handle and trigger.
  • BFG: The death ray takes a few seconds to charge up, but when it does, it fires a massive laser that vaporizes everything in front of you. There's also a chaingun for rapid-fire mass destruction.
  • Chainsaw Good: One of the potential weapons in the game. Sliding with it lets you zip along the ground fast to rip up other ducks.
  • Dies Wide Open: Ducks have their eyes wide open when they die. Other players can close corpses' eyes with the press of a button.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: It's a game about ducks.
  • Feathered Fiend: The ducks here fight each other by various means, usually by shooting.
  • Goomba Stomp: Equipping shoes allows you to do this to other ducks, unless they are wearing a helmet.
  • Hand Cannon: The magnum can blast through doors and hit any duck stupid enough to hide behind it.
  • Instant Roast: Ducks killed with fire, as well as the Death Ray and Plutonian Blaster, don't leave bodies but instead a dish of roasted duck. These can be dropped on other ducks' heads for a particularly humiliating kill.
  • Kill It with Fire: With flamethrowers, flare guns, roman candles, barrels of fuel, your own flaming body, and so on.
  • Lethal Joke Item: There's plenty of useless weapons lying around, like Nerf guns, musical instruments, and a gun with the barrel pointing backwards so that you end up shooting yourself when you fire it. However, even some of these seemingly useless items have hidden potential. For example, the Nerf gun disarms any ducks that take a hit, and it can be set on fire to make it into a terrifying rapid-fire flare gun. When sliding with the suicide pistol, the bullets go past your duck and used such it's as effective as the revolver, only firing in the opposite direction and without recoil. Getting a tombstone from a random weapon box is usually a disappointment, though it can be dropped on an unfortunate duck's head.
  • Level Editor: Built into the game. Maps can be uploaded and downloaded from the Steam workshop.
  • Little Useless Gun: The derringer has piss-poor range and only has one shot but seeing how you can kill people in a single shot... unless the other guy is packing heat.
  • Man on Fire: The result of touching fire for too long. You can try to put yourself if there's water or a fire extinguisher around, or light your opponents on fire to take them down with you.
  • Necessary Drawback: It happens a lot. Strong weapons need to be reloaded or recocked after every shot before it can fire again. Flintlocks and rocket launchers are worse as they have a lengthy reload animation of the duck putting in a new round.
  • No Plot? No Problem!: Ducks are pitted in mortal combat. Why? To be in mortal combat!
  • One-Hit-Point Wonder: Ducks go down in one hit, unless they are wearing armor. Then they have two hits!
  • Painfully Slow Projectile: The Plutonian blaster, though its slow projectiles are a One-Hit Kill.
  • Playable Menu: Apart from the options screen and the gallery menu, the menus in the game are fully playable with the same controls as the main game.
  • Playing Possum: The trip action allows you to do this if you don't get back up, allowing you to catch others off guard. However, that won't stop opponents from double-checking.
  • Precision F-Strike: There is a rare chance for a duck to instead say a censored obscenity when they're hit by a non-lethal object such as a NERF dart.
  • Recoil Boost: Similar to Spelunky, jumping and firing a gun at the same time gives you a boost in jump height. Rapid-fire weapons with heavy recoil like the AK-47 or shotguns can be used to practically fly, or when used while sliding, to glide across the floor, and these tactics are necessary in some of the more advanced challenge levels.
  • Retraux: Both in terms of the graphics style and the Rated M for Manly hand-drawn promotional images.
  • Short-Range Shotgun: Shotgun projectiles disappear after a short distance, but can break through boxes and doors in a single blast.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Single-Use Shield: Body armor and helmets can absorb one bullet and disappear. However, armor only protects the part of the duck that it covers; a helmet won't deflect a body shot.
  • Spent Shells Shower: Happens a lot with weapons like the chain gun or any weapon with lots of ammo.
  • Taunt Button: Or, rather, a "quack" button.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: It can sometimes be more effective to toss a sword at an enemy than run up to chop them, especially if they're packing heat.
  • Yet Another Stupid Death: Thanks to a combination of the map and its allotted weapons, you can get situations like shooting someone with a net gun, only for a spring to bounce their helpless body around until they smack into you, awarding them the point for breaking your neck.

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