Survival game Duckside gives guns to ducks and it’s not an April Fool’s joke

tinyBuild is developing a survival game about combat-trained ducks. Don’t worry, Duckside is real.

It’s been an interesting year for survival games so far with Palworld coming out of nowhere and taking the world by storm. The lovingly titled ‘Pokemon with guns’ set a precedent that tinyBuild looks to follow.

This time, it’s ducks with guns in a hilarious-looking title called Duckside. Naturally, they chose to announce Duckside on April Fools’ Day leading the internet to wonder if the game even existed.

Fortunately, it does and it looks like a whole lot of fun. The Duckside Steam page and an announce trailer reveal what to expect in this off-the-wall experience.

Duckside brings all the usual survival fare with resource gathering, crafting, and base building all present in its persistent, multiplayer world. This all comes with the added bonus that you’re a duck so you can fly with precision flight controls in its 50-player servers.

The developers explain a little bit of the ethos of Duckside and the decision to arm ducks with assault weaponry in the game’s brief synopsis. They describe the title as being “a persistent world survival game like DayZ or Rust… but you’re a duck, and so is everybody else.”

“Duckside isn’t just about surviving; it’s about getting into the mind of a duck. Being a duck. Feeling the cold steel of a machine gun on your feathers. And the peace of mind that comes with settling down after a long day, in a house you built out of trash that you’d looted off some guy’s corpse.”

While humans – or “the featherless” as ducks call them – are the real enemy, tinyBuild has revealed that players can face one another in PVP. Some of the more dastardly ducks out there may even choose to raid other players’ settlements or ambush them during a migration.

There’s no official word on a release date for Duckside yet but prospective players can register for the game’s open beta on Steam.