Some sequels feel very unlikely. Take Door Kickers, it’s been out for like what, 15 years… and I seriously did not expect it would ever get a follow-up. But here it is, and we now have Door Kickers 2. Apparently it was in Early Access for a while - and for some reason I completely missed it. Now it’s finally out as a 1.0 version.

The first game was a top-down 2D tactical game where you used a SWAT team to intervene in specific scenarios (killing entrenched terrorists, rescuing hostages, etc.) in relatively small environments. You had a very rich gameplay: it’s semi real-time. You plan your actions in advance while game is paused, and then you can unpause the game to see what happens in real-time. Anytime, you can pause the game again to change or plan for the next actions for each of the squad members, encouraging you to think in sequence or in parallel depending on the demands of the current situation. It was not just about kicking doors and firing - you could use things like smoke grenades, flashbangs and actual grenades. You sometimes had sniper support to clear enemies from far away, too. It started easy but became fairly difficult as you progressed to new maps.

The whole recipe is back in this sequel - and this time the whole thing is in 3D, which makes the presentation a little nicer, without changing any of the fundamentals. What I mentioned above is still there in the sequel, with yet more options and a campaign beyond the introductory maps.

Campaigns?

The campaigns are procedurally generated. I know, some or most of you will see the word as an indication of lack of design, and it’s often the case. But in this case, I don’t find it matters too much. It does not result in buildings that have weird shapes or in scenes that make no sense. And in this kind of games, it matters, as you want to keep bringing new challenges for the player, so that people don’t rely on memorizing the right approaches on fixed maps that never change.

In the campaign, there’s no strong storyline per se. They work by giving you a series of missions that need to occur on a map, in any order you want (new ones will apear every day as you complete previous ones), while there is a time limit to act on them. Some will be urgent (i.e. they need to be done within the day, which is a turn in the campaign system), some others will give you additional latitude (several days) to complete or give up on them. Some of the campaign missions will give you some additional XP boost (more on that later), or clues. Why would you need clues? Well, collecting clues help you unlock the bigger missions, the ones that can potentially end the campaign, and for which you have a longer time to complete - but remain locked until you have enough clues.

Now what’s interesting in campaigns is that your squad is limited in numbers. You have just maybe 20 soldiers in your squad, and if they get killed in action, or incapacitated, that’s one less soldier you can count on. Each character has a name and a set of characteristics, and they can level up as they complete missions. So there’s some RPG element to it. But it does not go as deep as having an actual background information and all (this is not Dwarf Fortress!). You get an avatar picture for each of them, and they have a set of different voices, but it’s not customized to the level of what you can see in XCOM2, for example.

Since the campaign continues for several weeks, you have to be very careful in each mission not to get too many of your guys killed. Not every downed soldier is killed - they can be injured, and unable to fight for several days afterwards until they recover. Most of your soldiers are going to be injured, but you can still throw them into new missions even if they are not fully recovered, as long as they feel well enough. Sometimes you have to make some trade-offs: most of your squad members have been injured at least once and you have to count on them anyway for the next mission, increasing your odds of a failure.

Before each mission, you get some intel, on whether or not there’s going to be a large number of enemies in the area, and if they are going to be well-prepared or not. That’s actually a vital piece of info. Well-prepared enemies are very tricky. They expect you, they will be placed in strategic corners to trap you as you move, and you are likely to lose a lot more men/women in the process.

To make the game a little easier, the XP you gain as you finish missions can be used to unlock some new equipment: armor, guns, grenades, flashbangs, explosives, rocket launchers (yes!)… Once unlocked, you can assign the item(s) to as many members as you wish, as long they have a slot available to carry said item. Armors and heavy guns will make your soldier slower and less mobile, which makes them easier targets in the end. So it’s all about trade-offs.

XP is not just useful to unlock new or upgraded items, but your soldiers who manage to survive several missions will level up in skills, and be faster in reflexes and more accurate when shooting.

One more thing that matters: in larger maps, you can have several entry points where you can place you soldiers ahead of the operation. They will be assigned to your squad by default, but you can sometimes choose alternative positions. Some of them require your squad members to have more mobility or flexibility to be assigned there (it can mean light equipment, or better stats). This makes the levelling up or the choice of equipment a part of the strategy to approach a map.

As you can imagine, once you factor all the different ways you can change your plan, the possibilities are… numerous.

Fire in the hole

The great aspect of Door Kickers 2 is that there are virtually tons of different ways to approach the problem. There is not one just valid solution, but most probably many of them. Of course, not all solutions are equally good or efficient, and this is where you will fine tune your skills as you go. For example, you will soon realize that sending a guy alone without direct backup is usually a VERY BAD idea. Trying your luck by opening doors one after the other only gets you so far. I find that sometimes you just need to let the grenades talk, killing as many enemies as possible, and scaring the rest to run away so that you can mow them down as they exit where they were holed up. To control the situation, you need to have several viewpoints across the scene - use windows as much as possible, and having guns pointing at different part of the scene as much as possible. Having blind spots is deadly.

Some missions have civilians that you need to rescue, and they are by far the hardest, because it means you can’t really use grenades anymore, at least not without knowing exactly what you are doing. Not only you need to be careful not to kill hostages, but enemies can get crazy and start shooting all the hostages if they feel trapped and unsafe. This means you will do some trial and error before finding something that works.

In campaigns, it’s fine to “restart” the game if you fail a mission - but you can also activate a permadeath mode which is much less forgiving, and does not let you restart anything. If you fail, you fail, and you pay the price. The advantage of this mode is that it gives you a lot more XP, so if you feel like your skills are good enough it’s a great mode to play with additional pressure.

Explosives?!

Some of the equipment you can unlock are C4-like explosives. They can be put on any kind of fence or wall and create a new entrance. This is an awesome new feature (I don’t remember seeing it in the first Door Kickers, at least not with that level of freedom) and this completely changes the way you approach well defended zone. Instead of working through the available entrances and windows, you can just go ahead and create your own hole, anywhere, and surprise the enemy. This also requires careful preparation, but it’s super fun as an additional way to think about the way you can attack the problem.

Very Hard

As you might expect, the game starts off kind of easy, with first simple missions to get your hands dirty, and once you enter a campaign this becomes a lot more tricky.

Some key campaign missions are very hard, with enemies being well-prepared and also very accurate when shooting back, giving you no chance to appear in the open. This is where you have to use tactics like suppressing fire, to cover your guys and enable them to move while minimizing the enemy exposure. It feels fairly realistic overall, and whenever you fail, it’s not the game cheating - you were just not thinking well enough.

Superb on the Steam Deck

This is an excellent game to play on the Steam Deck. It has a verified status, and this time, it’s well deserved - you can almost play it a minimum GPU TDP (4-5W to get steady 60 FPS) and make your battery last quite long with this game (easily 3 hours on a charge). Door Kickers 2 makes use by default of the haptic trackpad as a mouse, and it’s a wonderful demonstration of how useful the trackpads are for this kind of games. A regular controller would not work very well. You need precision when drawing the path of your soldiers on screen, and the trackpad is an ideal companion for that.

Long and good

This is a great example of a game where you can virtually spend hundreds of hours and never really see the end of it. There is just a huge amount of replayability, and the game is very fun. Missions don’t take that long to complete (or to fail), so the dynamic of just one more mission is fully at work here. There’s a great variety in the missions as well. Sometimes taking place outside, sometimes inside compounds, or a mix of both.

I did not touch on the fact that you can do multiplayer co-op. Unfortunately I could not find anyone to play with, probably because of my unusual time zone (Japan, GMT+9). But if you are in Europe or in the US time zones, I’d wage you would have more luck. It should expand the fun even further, especially if you play with friends you know. In case you are getting bored, there’s custom maps that you can make or download from the workshop on Steam, that bring even more diverse set-ups to experiment with. There are also a bunch of mods, like Project Ares to make the gunshots sound more realistic. As usual for this kind of sandbox games, the community ends up making the base game even better.

Overall, it’s an excellent release for the first part of 2025, and that deserves its spot right into our Recommended Games list!

Note: we received a key from the publisher for this game.