In a lot of ways, Project ARC feels like a throwback to the good old days of PS3 and Xbox 360 era gaming, where the fledgeling Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network stores and the boom in console multiplayer led to a lot of innovative riffs on familiar concepts. In this instance, Project ARC takes the tactical shooter that’s dominated by Counter Strike and Rainbow Six Siege, and pulls the camera out to give a top-down isometric view.
To be honest, if you’re a regular CS or R6 player, that’s pretty much all you need to know to pique your interest.
In our hands on with a mixture of devs and press, we played five matches split across the two game modes that the game will launch with. There’s the standard Team Deathmatch, which really feels like the lucid dream of an XBLA online twin-stick tactical shooter, and then there’s the mode that they’re calling Demolition, but is labelled as ‘Standard’ in-game. It has the, well, standard standard tactical shooter set up of one attacking team trying to reach one of two defended positions and place a timed bomb (sorry, the Decrypter), with all players having a single life per round. Oh, and there’s the ability for defenders to fortify, while attackers can break through destructible walls and windows.
Playing from a birds eye view, there’s an immediacy to how the game plays. You move with WASD, look with the mouse, and have to aim before you can fire – there’s no spray and pray here, which I very quickly discovered. The other thing I very quickly learnt is that crouching is a big deal. It lets you hide behind the waist-height cover, and anyone that’s stood up will shoot right over your head by default, giving you a split second advantage until they press the button to aim down at you, or shift to crouching themselves.
But crouching isn’t necessarily going to win you every fight, because battlefield awareness is everything, and you can’t see what’s going on if you’ve got your face buried in a hedge. Vision is actually a shared resource here. All players having a clearly defined cone of vision to their front, and a smaller radius of awareness around them, casting light and shadow through windows, doors and around obstacles, dynamically revealing and obscuring the enemy. You get to see everything that your teammates see, though, which instantly gives you a lot more understanding of what’s going on around the map – though this is handily assisted with a quick ping function as well.
As is pretty much inevitable for new online games, there’s a roster of stylised characters for you to choose from, each with a particular set of main and side weapon, a gadget ability, and then an item that you can select, depending on whether you’re attacking or defending. They’re not the most tactical looking bunch – there’s a Yakuza-looking guy, a shirtless chap with tattoos, a lady with a gold halter top and shiny puffer jacket, and a guy in a big cowboy hat – but they do have some good and distinctive styles of play and their roles and teamwork can really shine in Demolition.
You can pick any character whether you’re attacking or defending, and also double up on characters as well, but some are naturally intended for one side over the other – why bring the sledgehammer guy when you’re defending, and not the trip mine guy? You don’t need to smash through the boarded up walls when defending, but will rather want to use the ability to strengthen certain panels, and then place cover or barbed wire to slow the attackers.
Attackers can come from pretty much any direction, with multiple spawns to choose from, and I quickly felt the value of trying to coordinate efforts, whether splitting up to come from two sides or bull-rushing with the full team of five from one attack angle. You can obviously play for the elimination win, but playing the objective can also force the issue, whether that’s timing out the round as a defender or forcing them to counter-attack once you’ve placed the Decrypter.
There’s a lot more nuances here that we didn’t really delve into with just an hour’s playtime, and PUG Studios note that each firearm has its own sway and recoil characteristics, while aiming can be targeted at much more than just the high-low of standing and crouched – it does pay to mouse over an enemy to get the range right, I did feel – and obviously we only had the most basic of strategies start to emerge within Demolition.
Most importantly, I had a good time playing. There’s just something about the top-down angle and the shared team vision that makes the game feel lighter than Siege, to me, and that’s something that I really hope resonates with gamers at large. I can definitely see this working really well on consoles, as well.
Project Arc is currently only announced for PC and set for early access in 2025.
Bengali (Bangladesh) · 
English (United States) ·