About this app
What is Cyclops Smash?
The submission form will close on 1 October, at which time nominations will be put to our esteemed panel of judges for final review.
More information on judges, submissions and deadlines can be found here. You can also access interviews with last year’s winners and the final list for 2025, as well as for every year prior.
We look forward to working with our judges, and once again shining a light on some of the gaming industry’s best talents!
What is Cyclops Smash?
While the original game took place in a more casual hunting environment, Duck Hunters 2 shifts the action deeper into the woods and introduces a more chaotic setting. The ducks, previously depicted as targets, now appear armed and ready to retaliate. The tonal escalation matches Nolimit City’s house style, but the meaningful development sits in the feature layer.
The clearest example is the bonus structure, where the sequel widens the range of upgrades tied to its three free-spin tiers. Free spins activate when three, four or five scatter symbols land. Three scatters award seven Duck Hunt Spins, four scatters trigger eight Hawk Eye Spins and five scatters unlock ten Big Game Spins. Each tier grants progressively more upgrade selections, which is where the sequel’s expanded potential is concentrated rather than in the base game.
Nolimit City has also leaned harder into optional purchase mechanics, a defining part of its recent output. Duck Hunters 2 offers an extensive collection of optional purchase features. These span direct bonus buys, targeted feature purchases, and a booster menu that resets starting conditions.
How to play Cyclops Smash
Still, Kalshi had a nine-fold lead over Polymarket, its next closest rival. Polymarket, meanwhile, led the group with 762,000 app downloads, edging Kalshi, DraftKings and FanDuel in the category. The downloads represented a 13,509% weekly increase and 25% of total category downloads, Polymarket wrote in a statement.
Across the market, operators delivered high double-digit gains compared with Labor Day weekend, which featured a full slate of college football games but no NFL contests. Two operators, DraftKings and Underdog each saw triple-digit growth, delivering weekly increases of 125% and 119%, respectively. Three others, Polymarket, Crypto.com and Novig, saw gains of at least 30%, led by Polymarket with a weekly increase of 46%.
One interesting nugget surrounds weekend figures at Kalshi, where volume on Sunday only surpassed prior daily activity by $34 million, BofA data shows. Typically, Sunday volume for the quarter dwarfs that of College Football Saturdays due to the voracious demand for NFL offerings. BofA analyst Shaun Kelley attributes the irregularity to the possibility that Kalshi is “over indexing” on college sports.