DUCKSIDE

Introduction

DUCKSIDE's premise is a one-line joke that turns out to have real design behind it: DayZ or Rust, except every player is a duck, complete with hats, machine guns, and houses built from looted junk. Developer tinyBuild Riga entered it into Early Access on 25 September 2024, and it landed to genuine early enthusiasm, sitting at a Mostly Positive 72.8% across 1,491 English reviews. Reading through the negative sample in full, though, finds a story that's aged worse than that lifetime figure suggests — a game whose fast, well-designed early loop earned real respect from veteran survival-genre players, steadily undermined by a cheating problem that never got fixed and a development pace that Steam's own patch history confirms has stalled since around September 2025.

A fast, fun duck survival loop

The praise DUCKSIDE earned early on is worth taking seriously, because it comes from players with real standing in the genre to judge it against. One detailed review from a player with 5,000 hours in Rust and thousands more across other survival games calls out DUCKSIDE's pacing specifically: "what set DuckSide apart from every other game I've played in the genre is how fast paced the progression was and how easy it was" to get into a run and start playing meaningfully within minutes rather than hours. Community tag votes back up the genre framing — Survival, Crafting, Base Building, Open World Survival Craft, PvP — and reviewers across the sentiment spectrum credit the writing and presentation for actually committing to the duck premise rather than treating it as a surface-level skin over a generic survival game.

Cheaters since beta, and a controversial anti-cheat fix

The single most consistent complaint in the negative sample has nothing to do with the duck concept. Twenty-six of the 100 most-helpful negative reviews mention cheating or hacking directly, and the earliest of them are dated to the game's beta, before Early Access even launched. "Official servers have cheater problem for weeks and they do nothing about it. Cheaters since beta and cheaters now," reads one representative 46-vote review from October 2024. Steam's own patch history shows tinyBuild did respond, eventually: Update 0.10.0.1261 introduced kernel-level BattlEye anti-cheat on 13 March 2025. That fix produced its own wave of complaints rather than resolving the issue cleanly — multiple reviews dated after that update describe BattlEye as invasive, requiring manual removal after uninstalling the game, and blocking play on Steam Deck and Linux entirely, with one calling it "spyware/malware" with unnecessary kernel-level access. Worse, reviews dated well after the anti-cheat rollout continue to report cheaters active in the game, with one detailed 216-hour review from December 2024 describing "hackers zooming around" a landscape it otherwise calls "pure chaos." Whatever BattlEye changed, it does not appear, from the game's own review history, to have solved the underlying problem.

Renting your own server

A second, more specific complaint concerns how DUCKSIDE handles private multiplayer. Several reviews from launch week describe private server hosting as restricted to a small set of tinyBuild's partner hosting companies rather than open self-hosting — "they are engaging in server provider monopolistic practices by limiting the community server files to 2 hosting companies," reads one 74-vote review, while another puts the practical cost plainly: "you literally cannot play a game with friends privately without also spending $100+ a year." This review can't independently verify every detail of tinyBuild's hosting agreements, but the complaint is specific, consistent across multiple reviewers, and describes a genuine friction point for a game whose core appeal — playing a silly premise with friends — depends on exactly the kind of private hosting this restricts.

The roadmap that went quiet

The clearest, most verifiable finding in this review is also the most damaging: DUCKSIDE's own support has visibly slowed. Steam's announcement feed shows a real, active cadence through its first year — a Thanksgiving Update, a Christmas Update, a January Update, and a Military Gear Update as late as May 2025 — before the trail goes quiet, with the most recent substantive post a free cosmetic drop in September 2025. Multiple reviews independently notice the same thing: "the devs have already abandoned it along with their 'content roadmap,'" reads a 113-hour review from August 2025, and another from October 2025 describes the game receiving "a 'DLC' filled with a bunch of hats every year" rather than meaningful content. Recent-review sentiment reflects it directly — the 100 most recent English reviews run 55% positive, well below the 72.8% lifetime figure, and reviewers as recently as January 2026 describe servers with "2 or 3 players" rather than the population a survival shooter needs to actually function as one.

Final Verdict

DUCKSIDE earned its early goodwill honestly — a fast, well-paced survival loop wrapped in a premise that's funnier and better-executed than it needed to be, praised even by players who've put thousands of hours into the games it's compared to. What its own review history shows, though, is a persistent cheating problem that a controversial anti-cheat rollout didn't actually solve, a private-hosting model reviewers call anti-consumer, and a content pipeline Steam's own patch history confirms has gone quiet for close to a year. If you have a specific group of friends ready to jump in together and treat it as a short, funny co-op run rather than a long-term commitment, there's still something worth trying here. As a game to invest in for the long haul, its own recent reviewers are telling you plainly that the servers are emptying out.