Door Kickers

Genre: Strategy

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Best Action Games 5-in-1 bundle, along with Akane, Akuto: Showdown, Real Boxing 2, and Utopia 9: A Volatile Vacation.)

Door Kickers is a Top-Down Strategy game that has players controlling members of a SWAT team as they breach a building filled with hostile enemies, with the goal of sweeping through the building and taking out these enemies as quickly as possible without getting their team killed. This game was originally released on PC in 2014, ported to mobile devices in 2015, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020.

The presentation here uses simple 2D visuals with real-time indicators of your team’s point-of-view revealing where enemies are, with other areas obscured by a “fog of war”. These visuals are joined by tense music to accentuate the dramatic nature of the gameplay, along with crackly voice clips of your team responding to the situation in-game with comments like “contact” and “tango down”.

I really like the concept of this game in theory, plotting out your agents’ movements in a strategic manner, ideally to make for the most safe and effective sweep of a hostile area. I’m reminded a lot of the early games in the Rainbow Six franchise, albeit without the First-Person Shooter gameplay. Plus, the game lets players toggle between plotting out routes for their team and playing them through in real-time, making this a take on real-time where you can stop things at any time to rethink your plan.

However, in practice I was really disappointed with the gameplay here, in numerous ways. The room layouts the game provides frequently only have one narrow point of entry, limiting the usefulness of having more than one team member. There’s no collision detection between your team either, meaning you might as well just stack them on top of each other and have them moving more or less together to double their firepower. After all, what does it matter if there’s no need to cover each other?

The controls are clunky too. You can choose between standard gamepad controls or touchscreen controls, and while this does give you a lot of freedom to chart routes, as far as I can tell you’re not able to instruct multiple team members to follow each other or take the same route, they have to be moved separately, and good luck timing that. Even more frustrating is that you apparently cannot have your team moving one way while facing another, meaning that they’re a sitting duck while they turn after they round a corner.

You’ll have some added tools at your disposal, like a stun grenade, but you won’t know if you’ll be using it at an opportune time until you peek into a room to see how many people are inside, and your agents move so slowly that this can expose you to danger.

In short, I just don’t think the execution lives up to the premise in Door Kickers, and as a Strategy game I felt the strategy here was weak and disappointing. If you’re looking for games in this style that are better-executed, I think the closest thing I can recommend are XCOM-style Strategy-RPG games like the Mario + Rabbids series, the Valkyria Chronicles series, or if you want something closer to this game’s theme, try Phantom Doctrine, or even XCOM 2 Collection. By comparison, I can’t really recommend Door Kickers.

tl;dr – Door Kickers is a Strategy game where players direct members of a SWAT team to clear out a building full of hostile enemies. While the concept is good, the execution is poor, with multiple issues limiting the strength of the game’s central strategic elements, along with clunky controls. There are better options on Nintendo Switch if you want a game where you’re strategically moving units to take on hostile forces.

Grade: C

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