Escape From Tarkov – An extremely intense looter-shooter

Escape From Tarkov can be incredibly fun and extremely infuriating at the same time. It’s an intense experience that calls the player to do just one more raid, again and again.

Escape From Tarkov is a fun mix of looter-shooters, battle royales, RPGs, and war simulators. Your object is to perform successful raids which contain the following cycle: Load on the map of your choosing; gather valuables in there; avoid or kill other players; escape with your loot and without dying through a suitable extraction point – that’s the core gameplay loop in all its simplicity. It might seem rather dull but playing Tarkov has been one of the most intense, fun, infuriating and rewarding experiences in recent years.

The gunplay of the game is brutally realistic and polished. Weapon animations look smooth and authentic. Guns can be modified in dozens of different ways which completely changes the feeling of the firearm. If you possess quality bullets, you don’t need more than 3 hits to kill or get killed by another player. It quickly teaches players to be extremely cautious every single moment. Quality bullets mean that there are plenty of different types of bullets ranging from poor ones effective as nerf gun shells to expensive, highly penetrating ammunition.

There’s a myriad of different kinds of protection that have widely ranging protection stats. Cheapest get easily penetrated whereas pricy ones are considerably more protective, although with quality bullets they too wear out rather effortlessly. Actually, choosing the right kind of ammunition is more important than the type of gun shooting those bullets.

On the left is your gear, the middle section includes the loot you´re carrying, and on the right is an inventory of a dead player.

Loot is everything in this game. You can find a piece of bolt worth of 10k rubles in some box and in the next crate lies item called LEDX worth of 1.2 mil. rubles. The moment you acquire epic loot, your heart rate pumps up about three times the normal because now you must escape without dying. If you die, you’ll lose everything – all your gear and loot. This is the part where the magnificent sound design of Tarkov kicks in. If you listen closely, you can hear everything that makes even the slightest sound. Be it another player creeping in bushes, reloading mag, opening inventory, or even aiming gun sideways too hastily, you’re able to hear it. That makes the game exciting and extremely terrifying because if you can hear others, they also can hear you. The game quickly turns to a waiting game where whoever goes first usually dies. Laying completely still for solid 5 minutes just waiting for the safer route is completely normal in Tarkov.

The capture of a firefight. Notice how blurry the vision is because the player is taking hits.

When you get shot and survive, you gain a variety of harmful status effects ranging from bleeding to head tremors. Some are fatal if the player ignores first aid whereas others only affect e.g. aiming. It’s incredibly important to tend the wounds but you should pick the right spot for it since some injuries take up to 20 seconds to get fixed – there’s plenty of time to get shot during that. Everything else also takes time to execute. Be it searching packages for loot or reloading your mag, you must constantly decide when it’s safe enough to perform these lengthy tasks. For real, reloading your 30 sized mag a pace of bullet per second is ridiculously unnerving.

Escape From Tarkov is still in beta but it’s already fully realized, amazing game. I strongly recommend it for fans of looter-shooters, FPS games or hardcore experiences.

Pictures are in-game captures.

Publisher: Battlestate Games

Developer: Battlestate Games

Platforms: PC

Release Date: Still in beta. Full-release date to be announced.

Genres: Action RPG, Simulator, First-person shooter, Loot Shooter, Survival

PEGI: PEGI not yet rated. 18+.

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#FPS #Action #Multiplayer #PC #looter-shooter