Title: Door Kickers Developer: KillHouse Games Platforms: iPad Price: $4.99 ---
Door Kickers was one of the first games I wrote about, all the way back in 2013. Since then the game has been finished, expanded, garnered critical acclaim, and now the tactical SWAT game has made its way to iPad. Tactical strategy is a genre that excels on touchscreen, and Door Kickers' tense top-down action is a welcome addition to anyone's mobile game library.
Door Kickers is the kind of game that's easy to learn but challenging to master. The top-down line-drawing control scheme and the concept of troopers breaching rooms likely brings to mind games like Frozen Synapse and Breach & Clear, but personally I'd say Door Kickers is the better game compared to those two. The controls here are simple - drag to set your team's paths, hold on icons to choose actions - but provide a wealth of tactical depth. Do you go in loud or infiltrate silently? Split your teams into a stealth and assault force? Disorient terrorists with a flash bang or blow them away with a breaching charge? You can stack up on doors and synchronize breaches with go codes, use your snake cam to peer into rooms, time sniper shots, flank distracted enemies, and more.
As you progress, your arsenal continues to expand. New squad classes allow you to outfit your team with riot shields, silenced weapons, and better armor and guns, while unlocking skill tree abilities like double taps makes your team more efficient. The emphasis here is on efficiency. If you don't plan well, if you forget to check your corners, if you rush blindly into a room without a plan, your team will be pay with devastating causalities and dead hostages.
The game's content is just as varied as the tactics at your disposal. Multiple themed campaigns and myriad single missions takes your troopers from dilapidated apartments and dirty garages to Cartel-owned beach houses and hotel floors, to ships, cabins, and groceries stores. A customizable scenario generator provides endless potential challenges if those missions aren't enough.
Door Kickers was an excellent game on PC, and the tactical action feels at home on iPad thanks to its simple and effective touch controls. Perhaps the best aspect is that saves work cross-platform, so it's possible to transfer your progress from PC and continue playing on the go, or vice versa.
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