Duckside’s developers appear to be under the false assumption that people will tolerate a low-quality product if it’s “funny”, and they are seemingly unaware that meme games rarely live long without providing excellent gameplay, which Duckside does not.
Just like Deadside is a worse version of Rust or DayZ, Duckside is a worse version of Deadside.
While I understand the publisher may have required that badPixel share their code with other teams in the tinyBuild family, the final product reeks of desperation and is almost entirely devoid of passion, and I say this with no ill-will or malice towards tinyBuild or TinyBuild Riga.
It is simply not a very good game, that should have never made it to public alpha, let alone be sold as an early access title.
Image credit Duckside - Published by tinyBuild and developed by TinyBuild Riga.
No matter how much I may like tinyBuild and support small team studios such as TinyBuild Riga, I struggle to find anything good to say about Duckside as it is a lacklustre title that, if not for its meme potential, would have been dead on arrival and is already showing signs of struggling to retain its small community, with daily peaks of less than 3000 players, which while not terrible, will not be enough to support the game without an abundance of microtransaction or corners cut to ensure it leaves early access as even a somewhat viable title.
Image credit Duckside - Published by tinyBuild and developed by TinyBuild Riga.
While the base concept is solid, it is bare bones, and much bigger, better, and far less boring survival games have died in early access.
Based on what I have seen of Duckside so far and considering Deadside’s development woes, I have no reason to believe that Duckside will ever become more than a meme game with a small community that slowly withers on the vine.
Image credit Duckside - Published by tinyBuild and developed by TinyBuild Riga.
Duckside is a survival video game developed by TinyBuild Riga and published by tinyBuild, it was released on 25 September 2024 and retails for $14.99.
Duckside is available exclusively on PC.
As of October 2024, around 12000 people play Duckside on a fairly regular basis.
Duckside suffers from low activity, and while a moderate number of players continue to log in regularly, finding an active server is not easy and may require playing on a server with very high latency.
Duckside offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Duckside is unrated and contains:
I always strive to be fair when reviewing titles by small teams. However, Duckside is difficult to recommend.
At its core, it is a worse version of an already struggling survival game (Deadside) that only became “popular” due to its meme potential.
However, jokes alone cannot keep a game alive long-term when the mechanics are lacking, and Duckside is mechanically lacking in almost every area./
With subpar base building, crafting, map design, visuals, and, most importantly, horrifically poor gunplay, it feels like a game that was made more out of desperation than passion, and while it is not doing terribly at the moment, it will need to improve drastically if TinyBuild Riga wishes for it to avoid the grim fate of so many other lacklustre early access survival games that came before it
