Cops & Robbers is one of the all-time classic games of make-believe; the eternal battle between good and evil, played out in every playground for generations. And it doesn't stop there – we grow up, but the primal attraction of that conflict never leaves us, and we replace pointed fingers and 'pew pew' noises with films, books, and video games.

Door Kickers is one of those video games. Developed by KillHouse Games, its top-down tactics and emphasis on planning invite comparisons to those games that have best captured the sense of modern day Cops & Robbers; the SWAT series, and Rainbow Six, before Vegas went and ruined everything. It's been in Early Access for quite a while, but has seen a great deal of community feedback and development as a result. Now that it's reached full release status, how does it hold up against its peers?

Be under no illusions – this is no arcade-style run & gun. Door Kickers lets you plan an entire mission in advance and, once the action gets going, you have free use of the pause feature to adjust things on-the-fly. Don't think this makes things easy though – this is a brutally difficult game from the very start, and will not tolerate the impatient or imprecise. You may be in command of a highly-trained squad of police officers, but you're never more than one forgotten corner, or one misplaced order away from an abrupt, messy death, and a mission restart. This is a game that teaches the player with quick but violent lessons; assume there are enemies everywhere, move cautiously using cover, and always, always check those corners.

Things aren't helped by the often questionable AI of your officers. I often found them spotting an enemy, but then ignoring them – sometimes turning their backs on them entirely, and necessitating my manual intervention to force them to engage. This isn't a novel problem; in Frozen Synapse, if you want a unit to forget about enemies and just hustle, you must specifically order that unit to ignore threats. Here, though, you must specify if you want an officer to wait until there are no living enemies. When gun-toting criminals can ruin your day in seconds, it just feels like the wrong way around.

When it does go right, though, it's a fantastic experience; an orgy of meticulously-executed violence, taking place in mere seconds. I rarely make use of replay features in games, but here I found myself re-watching successful missions just to bask in the glory of the perfect plan.

Rather than giving you a random bunch of men for each mission, Door Kickers gives you a permanent squad, with each officer earning their own experience points. Customisation is surprisingly comprehensive, allowing you to change the name, appearance, and loadout of each member of the team. Initially, the selection of equipment is limited, but you can unlock more by playing through missions and earning points. Many of the missions, especially later ones, are simply too difficult without equipment upgrades, so there's a strong incentive to perfect the early scenarios and gear up as much as possible.

Successful missions also earn 'doctrine points,' which you can spend on skill upgrades which apply to everyone in your team – these cover things like accuracy improvements, and new tactics. Sadly, while doctrine points can be re-specced, there's no way to 'buy back' points spent on equipment. This is especially frustrating given that grinding missions does not earn you more points – there are a maximum of 3 points to be earned, total, in any scenario. If you buy some gear and then realise you need something else for a later mission, you're stuffed.

Missions are split into three campaigns and a huge selection of standalone scenarios. In practice, the campaigns are little more than several missions strung together, offering no real plot, but with the added difficulty of dead officers staying dead for the duration of the campaign, so you'll want to play it safe with your best troopers.

The missions themselves vary from basic room-to-room clearing, through hostage-rescue or bomb-defusal scenarios, to the excellent drug busts, in which you must collect evidence while enemies scramble to destroy it. There's also a competent random mission generator, and a robust level editor with Steam Workshop support, in case you exhaust the 100+ levels on offer, so replayability is a big draw.

Once you get into a mission, the big draw of Door Kickers is the planning interface. A much-loved feature of classic tactical games, it allows you to plan – in theory – an entire mission in advance. Then it's just a matter of hitting play and watching your squad do the dirty work. In practice, once you're past the first two or three missions, it's almost impossible to do the whole thing in one go if you want to prevent the wholesale slaughter of your hapless officers. In particular, it's impossible to use the 'magic wand' (a camera on a stick) in an automated plan, since it requires manual control to scan a room – never mind the fact that you inexplicably can't use it to peek around corners.

Between the enjoyable gameplay, appealing visuals, and the return of mission planning, it's difficult not to recommend Door Kickers to anyone with enough patience to tolerate the difficulty curve.

Mods.

Mods mods mods.

(Don't mind the hours, I played this on another account)

The most appealing thing for me from this game is the insane ease of modding. You can make a gun that fires at 10000 RPM, create a nuclear grenade, have a BULLET weapon fire two shots, or have armor that makes your troops invincible by just changing a line of code in a text file. I'm not exaggerating.

Or maybe not. Maybe you feel like that all Carbines/ARs are completely stuck in Semi-Auto is silly for you and you want to make them fire in bursts or auto. Maybe you feel like a weapon is a bit underpriced or overpowered. Make some quick tweaks why not.

You can also modify any official level in the game. Not only does that give many easy templates to work with and learn the editor without a tutorial, you can have a two dozen enemies in the first map just 'cause.

You can also change parameters like how fast your troopers move, how fast they aim, their FOV, etc. I know some people like testing that kind of stuff in video games.

Basically, you don't have to go to an obscure folder, download three different programs to extract the contents of a file, and then extract that files' contents (and realize you're pretty limited). Nope, just lovely, lovely text files. They also have developer notes to explain what each thing does.

Some deverlopers say that their game has modding support. There's that and there's this. You don't get this much freedom in most modern games anymore.

Just you know, don't use any of that to cheat. Cus' that's just being mean and not appreciate the effort the devs made into the levels.

I hope this review does more than justify the price. (If it's not been already by other reviews)

Named my first character Frank Castle, did every mission i could solo and pretended i was the Punisher for 20+ hours

10/10 best Punisher simulater out there

What is "Door Kickers"? As you probably already know - it is tactical real-time strategy that puts you in command of a SWAT squad. Of course, this game has some squad based mechanics that are similar to ones of games like XCOM (managing squad, class system, various equipment, leveling up, researching new skills, etc.). However, unlike XCOM, the gameplay here is real-time based which makes it much more engaging. The way orders to units are given can be a bit complicated, but soon you will realize that it's quite simple. Talking about controlling units, you can prepare a plan for them before starting the mission or you can give orders on the go; it's all up to you. The game has a lot of missions and most of them are quite challenging. There is also a random level generator and, if you are creative person, you can use the tool for creating custom levels. All in all, the game is really nice; the only downside is grafics quality - It's not that bad but it could be more deatailed. I would not recommend buying this game for it's full price, but be sure to grab it when it's on sale.
My rating: 8/10
P.S. By the way, this game also has a "replay" feature, that allows you, upon successful completion of the mission, to watch how your SWAT team swiftly secured the building and saved hostages and even save the replay as a videofile.

This game is amazing, the replayabillity, the challenge, the multitude of gameplay styles etc. are amazing. If you really are looking for a fun strategy/ tactical game this is a really good option!

I love this game already, and I'm not even done.

One day, I found this game. It looked interesting, so I put it on my wishlist, and bought it 50% off later.

My money was not wasted, I'll tell ya that.

I always have been a fan of tactics. I've played RTSs like Age of Empires and Dawn of War. However, nothing I have played comes close to this game. Y'see, this game means it when it says you make the tactics. The whole thing is controlled by you. The only limitations is how many doors you have to kick. In some missions, you can get multiple deployment zones and entry points and so on... you know what? I think i'll make an example.

One mission takes place in a pleasant little cove beside the ocean. My job is to go in, kill the bad guys, and arrest some dude. The game let me position my team where I wanted. Some came in the front, some in the sides, heck, I was even able to deploy one guy coming in off of the beach. Any door there was into the house, I could take it. That's one of the thing I like; there's not one way of entry. If one way works, try again another way in. Another thing to mention was just the level design in that they were kinda realistic missions. A bank robbery, a drug raid on a house in the middle of nowhere, a hostage situation in an embassy... these were all missions I did. The situation and level design made it feel like this was something that could actually happen.

The next big thing was the character customization of your team. It wasn't just expendable idiot numbers 1-10. It was different people. As well as their loadouts, you could change their picture and names. I soon had a team named after me and some of my friends. Also, they had randomly generated stats. Each person had things they were good at. This person is a great shot, this one can defuse a bomb quick, this one reacts quick... Once again, they weren't just a group of idiots with guns, they were actually different and unique. Then after that, there's 5 different classes you can take, all with special weapons. Stealth (my favorite, as they don't alert every bad guy this side of the equator you're here) take silenced weapons, Assaulters use rifles and SMGs, Shields, well, carry shields, Breachers are shotgunners, and finally, pointmen are cowboys. They all have very different play styles, so this adds in another factor of you asking yourself, "Hmm... what guns should I shoot people with today?"

Now, there are some downsides to this game. First of all, if you don't like tactics, waiting, and thinking, this isn't your game my friend. I know of another game that might be more your pace. It's called Call of Duty. Look it up. Second, this game can sometimes be just INFURIATING. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, so when I do missions, I wanna get all the points, which includes no casualties. That can be very difficult. The odds are often against you. You might have forgot one dude, one corner, one tiny bit of area, and sometimes, that can lead to a mission restart. Some missions are nigh impossible to do. And then there's everyone's favorite, HOSTAGE SITUATIONS. If one of those guys so much as hears you, they'll shoot a hostage. One hostage dies, and you have to stay completely over. One single innocent down, and it's back to the drawing board. So, this game can be just extremely hard, but I will say this; it feels so rewarding to finally see that "Mission Complete" screen at the end. This is a game that will make you work, but when you get your reward, it is amazing, because you know you earned it.

All in all, I love this game. I haven't played for very long, but I have a lot more to do, including 4 campaigns. That's right, this game has campaigns. I didn't cover everything, but I covered what I think is most important. Now shouldya buy this game, or go waste you money on things like beer, hookers, and collage? Well, I dunno at the full $20, but if there is another sale when it drops to $10, I'd definitely recommend picking it up. It's a fun game and there's a lot of replayability in it. so, kick doors, down tangos, and rage over hostages being executioned because Larry in the back tripped over a twig.

And that concludes that. Now go home and read a book or summtin'.

You will break many doors in this game, that is why companies cut down rainforests so that they can provide more wood for the new doors to be built on the place where you broke them and you know what? The whole planet dies because there will be no rainforests and it is just because you cannot take your time to open the door properly but instead you kick the door.

Not worth $20 for the content in the game. I got it on sale so it's worth $10, but it doesn't impress.

(To preface, this was originally written as a not-recommended and has changed back and forth many times. My thoughts are still exactly the same, but my tolerance of the problems has increased a little bit as time goes on. Take from that what you will.)

This game has a lot of strong pros and a lot of strong cons. I'd recommend reading the details to determine if the game is for you rather than taking the recommend at face value!

So the best way I can describe this game is if you take Frozen Synapse and SWAT (4, not 3) and combine them into a game with quick objectives and short but satisfying levels. You'll be tasked to take your organized team, breach and enter various locations, and complete various objectives such as neutralizing terrorists, rescuing hostages, retreiving evidence, and such.
You can either choose to plan out your assault completely from the start and play it out, or you can organize it in chunks with a handy pause function. Pausing makes the game a bit easier but making a single plan can be very rewarding.

The game has a mission generator (which is less of a generator since it basically grabs a random mission layout and randomizes the enemy and objective layout). There's a lot of content here for you to keep playing, granted you don't mind having a limited amount of variety in the way of objectives and how you handle them (which is not a bad thing since that's a lot how real scenarios play out - like the book).
Real life tactics can come into handy play here minus a few key ideas such as leaning- though I'm not sure how it would work given its control scheme...

...Which is where the problems start to become evident.

You see, the way you set a path for your SWAT members to follow is you click and drag them one. In order to place actions along the path, you create nodes on it by right clicking. This makes sense in theory but it has several hangups which severly ruin the flow. Rather than having to delete parts of your path manually to change them, you just pick a part earlier and draw from there which will erase everything that comes after that spot. Unfortunately, it's very easy to do this by accident and the game lacks any sort of undo functionality. This can result in you spending upwards to 5 - 10 minutes making an intricate path only to accidentally change the wrong team member's path or mis click, wasting your time having to redo it.

The game also has a large auto-snap when highlighting notes, making precision very difficilt. If you have multiple teammates on a similar path with each of their nodes next to each other, the game turns into a frustrating pixel hunt trying to get the correct officer in the correct part of the path.

The game also has some problematic design choices that clash with the subject matter. Namely that the game wants to you play very fast score wise (and some missions require you to be fast with as quick as a 10 second or less time limit for hostages) yet actively discourages fast playing with realistic health and mobility stats that change with weaponry and body armor. In order to get 3 stars for the mission, one of the requirements is to beat a certain time. This wouldn't be a problem but these times are very unforgiving, often forcing you to ignore your officer's safety in favor of working very quickly. Often you'll find that you won't have time use a spy camera or silently pick a lock as you'll compromise your score.
Now, if score was only for personal gratification and leaderboards, I wouldn't have a problem with this design. However, you use the stars that you unlock in order to purchase other weapons, body armor, and tools. If you're earning less stars per mission, you're going to progress a bit slower.

The progression itself isn't terribly slow, but it also feels like a system that's designed to limit the players' toolsets rather than give them options. It's restrictive and ultimately pointless as a lot of unlockables aren't worth it compared to the superior options. What you'll most likely do (and a lot of players also recommend this) is to find an easy generated mission and grind it until you have all the stars you need to unlock what you want. You won't be doing it for long, as unlocked items are unlocked for everybody (as opposed to per officer), I feel like this artificially extends playtime rather than actively engaging the player. This could have been done better. It's not a dealbreaker but it's also needlessly frustrating for the first one or two hours of play.

This isn't to suggest that the game is bad, however. Like I already said, if I could give this game a Neutral rating, I would.
While I didn't experiment much with it, the game has a really neat campaign mode where officers that are killed during missions are permenently dead. Since you also train your officers as part of the progression system, this can make for a really interesting dynamic where you need to take the risk of sending in your best trained officers to deal with a mission but have the possibility of losing them, or sending in worse officers at the risk of performing the mission not as well. It's not terribly fleshed out, but it's still interesting.
The game can also be really satisfying when you're not fighting the mechanics or design choices. It's a really strong idea and it works well enough, but some of the execution falls a bit flat.

If it sounds like these things wouldn't bother you much or you're willing to look past them, then by all means pick this game up- as there is a lot of fun to be had here. However, if you think these will bother you, then either wait until this game is on sale or wait for Door Kickers 2. Apparently some issues may be fixed there and I think it's worth keeping note of.

Hopefully this helped! And yes, I know this review will have a very low number of votes because people downvote most negative reviews for whatever reason. So thanks for reading if you got this far!

Easily the best top down tactical stradegy game there is.