Door Kickers Is SWAT A Handheld Strategy Game Should Be

Every Thursday afternoon – at around four or five – I like to kick back for a minute and swipe away at the App Store’s latest clutch of downloadable games. Although I usually end up ogling one or two, many of these new releases (often the more obscure) simply slip under the radar. Thankfully Killhouse Games’ Door Kickers failed to escape my weekly rummage.

At first glance, the intuitive SWAT simulator doesn’t exactly jump out at you. The title is dumb, the key art middling, and the handful of screenshots do little to have punters racing for their wallets. Still, after sifting through the blurb, I knew I had to play it.

In a nutshell, Door Kickers is a real-time strategy game that has you commanding an elite team of police operatives. Whether tackling solo missions or running through one of the game’s multi-part campaigns, your objective remains the same: to gun down criminals, rescue hostages, and secure evidence.

Your success in carrying out these tasks depends on a number of factors. First off, there’s the SWAT team itself. Starting out, your options are fairly limited yet more and more are filtered in gradually as you gain experience points between missions. After a short while you’ll be able to purchase guns, armour, and equipment while also selecting abilities from the Discipline skill tree.

This element of customisation has perhaps the most noticeable effect on how a raid is carried out.
Obviously, the higher an officer’s rank, the better they’ll be at picking off targets. Meanwhile, kitting a few of your men out with shields will change their role in the team considerably, as will equipping them with shotguns or assault rifles.

The beauty of Door Kickers is that it weaponises the unknown against its players. You may have one of the best suited SWAT teams in the business, yet, at the start of each deployment, the only sections of the map that aren’t greyed out are those immediately in your sight range. Walls, doors, and windows can hide pockets of lethal enemy resistance, forcing players to think tactically whenever moving around.

Thankfully, there is a healthy array of tools at the player’s disposal. Much like in Rainbow Six or Splinter Cell, operatives can use specialised scopes to see through doors, allowing them to get a read on targets. After a brief bit of surveillance, you can then plan your attack, using anything from breach charges and door hammers to the more subtle lockpick.

All of this is done via the touchscreen, with players tracing a line to chart each character’s movements. When combined with the game’s stop-time feature, this allows you to initiate tactical assaults on the enemy that are all played out in real time. Sure, learning the ropes can take a little time but when you manage to flawlessly pull off a pincer-like flank, it’s an unbeatably rewarding experience.

As mentioned before, missions can be played separately and are either preset or randomly generated. Alternatively, you can enlist in a multi-part campaign that tracks the status of your operatives between missions. Naturally, if killed in action, they won’t be able to partake in the later missions of that campaign. No matter what your preferred style of play is, you’ll always earn stars and XP which are used to unlock new gear.

With it’s top down view and gritty urban aesthetic, Door Kickers may not be the best-looking game available to iPad users. This hardly matters, however, as fully three-dimensional characters and environments would add very little to the overall experience. As it stands, Door Kickers is a fantastic debut for Romanian studio Killhouse Games and one that feels as though it was built for tablets, despite being originally launched on PC. Although it’s easy to nod and gives the thumbs up, Door Kickers is one of those rare titles that I would strongly recommend to any who have an iPad within reach.