Action Squad is a 2D interpretation of “tactical” shooting with a lazy difficulty balance and an inelegant mode of play that may leave you wanting.

Killhouse Games released the first Door Kickers in 2014 and my attention was caught by it immediately. With an aesthetic drenched in the gunmetal grays and dark blues of tactical police games that had come before - SWAT 3: Elite Edition having been a personal favorite when I was younger - Door Kickers presented a top-down tactics game with a blend of pausable real-time play and intricate planning of squad maneuvers. It was an utterly comfortable and natural evolution of the games it was spiritually channeling.

In that context, the next game to bear the Door Kickers branding is pretty strange.

Door Kickers: Action Squad is cast in an entirely new mold: an over-the-top 2D action-platformer. Much of the broad verbage that you might expect from this subgenre has been made to fit, more or less. You’ll breach doors, throw smoke or flashbang grenades, and clear rooms while perhaps searching for hostages or a giant bomb that needs defusing. One of tenets of the genre that did not get transplanted was squad mechanics, though online and local co-op with one other player is available - more on that later. The translation of these actions into 2D feels clumsy at times and tactics have nearly vanished from the formula.

There is seldom any elegant solution to, for example, prioritizing targets. Consider this scenario: you open a door to a room you had no sight into previously and find a generic armed suspect in front of you, then some distance away is a hostage, kneeling, and behind that hostage is a suspect who by design will intentionally execute hostages shortly after spotting you. How do you get the hostage out alive? If they’ve already seen you, then your best option may be to dump ammo into the direction of the problem, hoping you can shred through the first suspect in time to directly attack the hostage killer, all while hoping your gunfire doesn’t kill the hostage in the process. There are some slightly more neat answers to this problem, but you would have to be playing a class and gear loadout that has such an answer available.

Here is Youtuber ZiemowitP very neatly demonstrating the One True Tactic of Action Squad: Be the Assaulter and Pull the Fucking Trigger. You can be good at this game, but it fails to reward being clever.

There are six classes of characters to choose from before you start a mission, but if you are playing alone, only four of them really seem viable for general use. The Assaulter and Breacher classes have devastating weaponry available (assault rifles and shotguns, respectively) that make them very easy choices for many missions. The Shield guy’s defense and the eclectic but potent abilities of the “Off-duty Guy” make them interesting choices. I just can’t sort out how to make the Recon and “Agent Fergie” work in single player. Maybe there’s a nuance to the game that is exploitable that breathes life into them, but my experience has been that they lack the sustained offense to deal with a room that has many bad guys in it, which of course you will run into often.

There is one game mechanic, common to all classes, that can help paper over the weaknesses of whatever build you choose. All characters have a Special gauge that lets them burn meter toward replenishing armor, health, or your stock of expendable gear. Killing or arresting suspects and saving hostages may grant you the Special Points to fill this gauge. You can possibly save up meter for a class-specific Ultimate, but it’s hard to swing that in harder levels and the value is frankly questionable. If it wasn’t for the ability to relatively cheaply summon armor and health , the game would have to be rebalanced drastically to function. It’s hard to escape combat unscathed without using expendable gear, and you run out of that gear quickly. It feels cheap to slog your way through a mission, popping magically appearing medkits and armor along the way, but it’s very hard to avoid that.

I can’t go on without addressing that it’s at least a little weird to play a game where you’re a cop. I was playing the aforementioned SWAT 3 while I was a kid, and naive to the true nature of law enforcement. That’s no longer the case. This game, to be fair, is pretty well divorced from reality in nearly every way, but there’s one thing I think about every time I play this game. There’s an enemy class, apparently known as “Snitches,” that are completely unarmed. They can surrender to you peacefully, but if you turn your back for a moment they will run away from you. The danger here is that they are one of the few enemy types in the game that will open closed doors and travel room-to-room if you have startled them. This causes a domino effect where enemies the Snitch runs past become alerted and will start moving in on your position. What’s the tactical thing to do with a running Snitch? Shoot them in the back.

While there is a bonus for arresting a Snitch, there is no penalty for killing a Snitch. By the way, that same enemy has a miserable take on a Mexican accent and it makes me unhappy every time I hear it. I don't have cause to believe it's in bad faith but that actor's read of "Vámanos, homey!" has worn a sore spot into my mind.

Setting aside that one enemy, again, the rest of this game is a cartoon. The Off-duty Guy is wearing nothing but boxers and boots from the waist down. Some of the enemies look like they’re from a post-apocalyptic game. Once you absorb that the game is not going to give you a tactical experience you might have expected and take it for what it is, it’s fine. I’ve put more time into this game than needed to review it, for what that’s worth. I have not been able to experience two-player, but I suspect having two players gives you a cumulative toolkit large enough to deal with scenarios and perhaps actually claw some of that tactical experience back. That said, if you are looking into Door Kickers: Action Squad because of it’s direct and indirect heritage, then put ‘em on Safe and let ‘em hang; there’s not much here for you.