Bigger, better, browner: Door Kickers 2 is almost the perfect sequel

I don’t reach for the ‘m’ word – masterpiece – very often, but describing this top-down turnless tactics game without recourse to it would be perverse. Those fifty-one months of Early Access tinkering have paid off big time. If it wasn’t for the potentially divisive theme, the lack of saving, and some minor realism failings, I’d say KillHouse had produced that rare thing, a critic-proof game.

Assuming you don’t mind a fictional setting clearly inspired by the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and – if prone to rage quitting – are content to swear off the bigger/longer missions, Door Kickers 2 should repay its modest admission price many times over.

Much more realistic combat mechanics… larger, more varied and naturalistic maps… richer campaigns… an improved UI… this £20 fun fount is superior to its highly entertaining predecessor in just about every way.

Like DK1 it manages to accommodate all types of tactician. Meticulous planners can spaghetti a level with path squiggles and action meatballs before starting the clock and sitting back. More spontaneous souls like yours truly are free to make things up as they go along, moving team members piecemeal and stopping the clock regularly to ponder, tweak, and rue.

The fact that you can’t save mid-mission means some of the most spectacular standalone missions are eye-wateringly hard. Yesterday I unlocked ‘All the Way’, a set of five show-stopping single sorties. In one of these, ‘Raptor Down’, your nine-man team is expected to fight its way into the heart of a Nowheraki settlement, destroy a downed drone, and then get back to the LZ for extraction. ‘This looks like great AAR material’ I naively thought, as, notebook open beside me, I took on the challenge for the first time.

In the half-a-dozen attempts that followed, most of my heavily-armed and armoured tango toppers perished within a minute of leaving their deployment discs. Thoroughly humbled, it wasn’t long before I admitted defeat, and returned to smaller, less intimidating challenges, of which, thanks to a bulging mission folder, busy workshop, and superb random map generator, there’s a limitless supply.

The introduction of possibilities such as kneeling, sprinting, suppressive fire, and window entry in combination with the LoS and LoF sophistication that comes from the use of a 3D engine, give DK2 firefights the kind of subtlety and resonance usually only found in first-person tactical shooters. Bring freeform mouse-holing into the equation (achieved with breaching charges and AT4s) and the developer’s proud boast that buyers get the “best portrayal of modern Close Quarters Combat and tactics in a video game” starts making sense.

When things are going well in a hostage rescue, VIP snatch, or straight terrorist elimination outing, there’s something almost balletic about DK2’s pauseable blood-letting. A split second after the flashbangs tossed through facing doorways by Biggles and Princess detonate, Cobra goes left and Jones right, felling stunned insurgents with stuttering MP5s as they cross the thresholds. The go-code that triggered this bifurcated bull rush also prompts Manzini, who is outside in the yard, to smash a window and tear down drapes, giving light machine-gunner Nestor a clear sight line into a kitchen where three hostiles are sheltering. The resulting torrent of XM250 rounds kills one of the targets, and suppresses the others, allowing Scotch to safely kick-in the kitchen door, and deliver the coup de grâce with his M1014 shotgun.

As heartwarming as it is to watch an op go like clockwork, DK2 is arguably at its most memorable and exciting when the game’s gloriously unpredictable and largely believable (see on) AI decides to stick a dirty great spanner into that clockwork. There you are smugly congratulating yourself for clearing two-thirds of some sprawling palace, factory, or hideout, without tinging any team member portraits yellow or red, when, out of the blue, one of your Rangers, CIA men, or Nowheraki SWATists (Eventually, you have access to three distinct force types each with their own play styles and doctrine trees) blunders into a poorly scouted room and finds himself standing toe-to-toe with a wild-eyed suicide bomber, or takes an RPG to the abdomen while advancing across a suspiciously quiet courtyard.

I love how the game’s deep realism, destructible scenery, and dangerous adversaries in isolation or in combination sometimes produce the unforeseeable and unmanageable. In one dinky mission I lone-wolfed yesterday, my one-man-army was tasked with entering a house and grabbing a VIP without spooking him. On the fourth or fifth attempt, things were going well. Using a mixture of door-breaching slap charges, SMG bursts, and unsolicited melee blows, my lightly wounded Ranger had reached the bigwig and persuaded him to surrender.

In order to exit the property, the pair had to bypass a room that, judging by the commotion and suppressive fire emanating from its two open doors, was occupied by more than one trigger-happy camper. I opted to flashbang the hornets’ nest, and then charge in.

A less than optimal detonation location meant only one of the room’s four (!) occupants was seeing stars when Cobra entered.

Smart SMG work neutralised the stargazer and his nearest comrade, but my heart sank when these telling bursts were followed by a “Changing mag!”. Although my woeful preparation looked to have doomed Cobra, mischievous Fate had other ideas. Fortunately, one of the other two hostiles decided to leg it as my man reloaded, and the other one turned his SMG on the indisposed intruder and squeezed his trigger only to find he too was out of ammo! To cut a short story even shorter, Cobra reloaded faster than his adversary, and, after another couple of close calls, managed to depart with his captive.

Its quite some time since I played the original Door Kickers but I don’t recall weapon choice being nearly as significant in that title as it is in this one. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the generally roomier maps, maybe its a side-effect of better ballistics code, but there have been several occasions this past week when I’ve restarted a mission after quickly realising that I’d brought knives to a gunfight.

If you held a breacher shotgun to my head and forced me to grumble about something in v1.02, blindspots in that ballistics code or weaknesses in adversary AI would probably earn my light scathe. Currently DK2 doesn’t sim ricochets or bullet penetration, and its foes arguably aren’t wary enough of corpse-strewn spots and closed doors under MG fire.

(To be continued. Next week I’ll share some thoughts on the campaigns)