I very heartily recommend you play extraction shooter Escape from Duckov. Do no be fooled by the silly name or cartoony presentation: this is a very in-depth game with an enormous number of mechanics to get to grips with, especially if you’re newer to the looter-shooter format. But fear not, for I have spent so very many hours making so very many mistakes that I am now expertly placed to warn you how not to follow in my footsteps. Here are 12 things I wish I knew before playing Escape from Duckov.
You’re going to die, a lot, and that’s OK
Your goal in Escape from Duckov is to explore an overworld populated by murderous ducks, in order to loot the equipment you need to build up your base, improve your weapons and armor, and head off ever-further in pursuit of new quests. However, on each and every trip, you’re risking absolutely everything you’re taking with you, alongside anything you pick up on your way. While many extraction shooters play out as multiplayer PvP games, where loss of progress feels far more normal, Escape from Duckov is a purely single-player shooter. This can make the losses almost unbearable until you develop a zen-like approach to failure. Because you will fail.
Every trip is fraught, with the overworld’s population of enemies changing each time you head up there. The enormous explorable areas maintain the same layout, albeit with lockers and chests in varying places, but where certain gangs of marauding ducks hang out can change, along with the spots where you might find a few named boss types. Let your guard down and you can be easily ambushed. Venture too far with not enough first aid and you can be easily taken down. Bring the wrong ammo type for your current weapons and you can find yourself helpless. Or just completely goof up and let a hand grenade explode at your feet and you’re also done for. The point is, you’ll die.
You’ve got one chance to get your stuff back
Now, you do get one chance to recover your lost items. Every death returns you to your base, your character inventory almost emptied, and your spirit dented. But fear not: everything you died with is still up there, next to the site of your death. All you need to do is head back up and grab it! Except, remember why you died? That’s likely to still be a problem. And if you die again before you pick it all up, then it’s all gone forever*. So you can’t just be running back up there in your duck underwear and hope you’ll be fine. You’ll always want to make sure you have back-ups of vital equipment like armor, weapons and ammo stashed in your base’s enormous warehouse.
Even then, don’t get cocky. Think of this trip as a recovery only, no matter how tempted you might be to tick off another quest en route, or take an extra risk for the sake of some big loot. Mess this up and all your best equipment is gone-gone. It’s about getting in and out, ideally without ever being seen. Find your death site, move everything over as quickly as you can, and then extract at the nearest exit. Anything else is hubris, and believe me, you will need to close the game down and take a walk if you screw this up because you didn’t focus.
*OK, there’s a way to save scum
Yes, OK, it’s not necessarily gone-gone. There is a rather scummy way to get your stuff back if you’re willing. So long as you’re prompt (usually within one real-world hour) after you last had the equipment, you can return to the main menu, choose your save slot, and then click “Restore Backup” in the bottom right. This lets you pick from the last ten autosaves you never knew the game was making and overwrite your current position. It’s obviously cheating, and I really recommend against it: a lot of the fun of Duckov is facing up to those losses, and rebuilding from meager parts with a few early-stage runs to gather equipment for crafting what you’ve lost. But then again, no one else will ever know.
You want to increase your carrying capacity ASAP
For a game with 48 billion-trillion pieces of loot to gather, Duckov doesn’t give you a lot of space to carry them. By default you have 22 slots in your inventory, which will very quickly be taken up by spare weapons, various types of ammo, first aid, and food and drink, and that’s before you’re vacuuming up the items in the overworld. Some loot stacks, other loot doesn’t, and juggling what you can carry is a constant concern. So the first thing you want to do is add space.
The easiest way to do this is with the various bags you can find and craft. The first of these, a make-up pouch, adds a very welcome extra row of inventory slots, but you’ll almost immediately be craving more. As you explore further out, you’ll find larger bags that not only add an abundance of new slots, but also increase the total weight you can carry before you become encumbered. But bags are only the start.
It’s always worth noticing what various bits of armor can do for you here, too. You’ll usually have to sacrifice extra protection for larger numbers of extra slots, but body armor can give you a very welcome handful of additional spaces. The game also has slightly mystical items called Totems, two of which you can wear at any time that will augment various abilities and defenses. One of these is called Sturdy, which at level 2 will boost your inventory slots by 25 percent.
There’s a quick way to get more totems
Speaking of Totems, something Duckov absolutely does not make clear is that there’s a quick way to access more of them via some peculiar incantations in the sewers. In the top right corner of your base is a hatch that leads down to some sewers below. From here you can reach a “secret” passage to a location in the first overground area, and a boat that’ll take you to town once you can find or afford the tickets. But there’s also an odd little area with chalk circles on the floor. If you’ve played at all, you’ll notice you’re picking up an awful lot of Fading Feathers from your killed enemies, and while selling these can get you some much-needed cash, saving them up also offers this big benefit. Because down here you can “sacrifice” them, eight or 80 at a time, in exchange for random Totems.
What you get is very unpredictable, but it can be game-changing. That Sturdy II I mentioned was something I got this way, and it’s made such a difference. Others will improve your health, your armor, stamina limits, perception ability (the cone of sight in which you can spot enemies), and how your guns work. It’s nightmarish picking only two to wear at a time, honestly, but the more choice the better.
Night is not quite as bad as the game suggests
If you try to leave your base anywhere close to dusk, the game will warn you that it might be a better idea to sleep the night away rather than risk the increased danger. And right at the start, that’s advice worth listening to. But it won’t stop warning you, even when you’re ready. Once you feel comfortable with some solid armor and powerful weapons, you can begin to brave the dark. The difference is robo-spiders, which come out at night and are very powerful foes. But not crazy tough, and if you make sure to use cover and quality ammo, you’ll mow them down quickly enough. And their robotic cores are key to unlocking a lot of the mid-game goodies.
Your doggy chum has no weight limit
Accompanying you on your expeditions is a little, loyal pup. He doesn’t seem to do anything at all, until you notice he’s capable of carrying stuff. As you upgrade various elements, you can increase these slots to two or three after a fair few hours, and they prove to be super useful. Firstly, anything your doggo is carrying isn’t lost when you die. Presumably he bravely scampers back to your hideout with whatever you gave him. This means he’s ideal for carrying items you must never lose, like the key pouch you can find that’ll hold all sorts of keys and paper passes whose loss would be awful. Like, the worst. Hideous. Yes, I literally just did it. I swapped out the Key Case for a super-heavy set of body armor I wanted to bring back as spare, and then everything went horrible wrong.
However, my stupidity aside, the dog is also fantastic for its apparent infinite strength. Often, even when you’ve more inventory slots than you need, you’ll find yourself over-encumbered as higher level weapons and armor start to weigh four or five kilograms each. But hand them over to dog-chum and they’re out of your inventory, and he’s unbothered. Just remember to also take them back off him when you get back to base. I am embarrassed by how many times I’ve set off on a new trip with the poor thing already carrying a massive plastic barrel and a set of level 5 armor.
Storms are a real pain
Every few hundred hours (which translate to real-world minutes) the overworld is consumed by a peculiar purple storm. And it will kill you in seconds. For the longest time, there’s simply no way around this. You might stumble on some injections that purport to help early on, but don’t even try. You’re going to have been playing for a hefty length of time before braving storms is even worth considering, with specialist armor and equipment. In the meantime, just sleep your way past them.
Frequently check your Build station
Your base begins with a Build station, represented by what looks like a large blueprint on a stand, and it’s via this that you’ll learn what loot you need to build the many stations that will fill your base. But it also occasionally adds new and very useful builds without bothering to tell you. It’s worth regularly checking the board to see if something new—perhaps an ATM or even a Black Market storefront—is available to gather for and build.
You can’t have too much of anything
You will occasionally notice you have so many of one particular item that you feel convinced it makes sense to sell or dismantle them to make more space in your Warehouse. And sometimes you’ll be right, but oftentimes you’ll wish you hadn’t. Later quests can surprise you with a sudden need for both of those pointless footballs you found earlier, or you might think your Skill Enhancements no longer need the Cold Core Fragments now that you’re finding Crimson Core Fragments, but you’d be wrong. It’s always worth trying to add more space than delete stuff to create it.
Here’s how to mod weapons
Another element the game forgets to teach you is now to mod weapons, and while if you stumble on it you’ll think it’s blatantly obvious, until you do it can be very frustrating. Adding the mods like grips, muzzles, scopes and magazines is not done when you’re crafting weapons, no matter how much it might look as though it should be. It’s done after, and it’s done just in your regular inventory. To adapt a weapon, open your inventory, left-click on the weapon, and a window will appear with all its details. There will be boxes for available mods, and you then need to drag and drop the mods from your inventory or Warehouse into these slots. That’s it. But it would have been nice if it had said so.
There really aren’t gamepad controls
It feels impossible that anyone would release a game in 2025 without gamepad controls, but that’s genuinely the case for Duckov. It’s fully mouse/keyboard, and it works splendidly that way, especially with all the shortcut keys. However, this is essentially a twin-stick shooter, and it would make so much sense to play it on your preferred controller! So far there hasn’t been any hint that adding gamepad options is a priority for the developers, and given it’s sold an extraordinary two million copies in two weeks on PC, it’s obviously not hindering anything. It does suggest console versions are a fair way off, however.
