My Project Arc playtest played out like a horror movie. I was skulking around a hospital, my teammates were dead and my enemies were not just in power, but clearly having a really good time running me down. Project Arc is a top-down competitive shooter set in the PUBG universe, and the people I'm playing against in this early playtest are much better than I am.
It's not my fault. Krafton has decided the best way to let journalists get hold of their game for the first time was to pit them against a team of esports organisers that Krafton had paid to be there. They were more experienced with Project Arc, they knew the maps, and they were hiding in corners and vents ready to kill us the second we lost focus. Every time we entered a room blind or turned a corner looking the wrong way, we'd pay for it with blood. It felt less like a battle of equals and more like the cooling tower scene in Aliens—except the aliens had military grade weaponry and a grudge.
On the plus side, the unmitigated slaughter created an unbreakable bond between the five of us as we came together against the common threat of players we have no business getting matched up against. As I managed to rack up two entire kills versus the other team's 10, I was reminded of that feeling of trying to learn a game a year after launch, when the players still hanging around are mercilessly good.
Once I got past the one-sided matchups, Project Arc was pretty fun. It's a top-down shooter—a marriage of genre and camera angle that you rarely see outside SWAT tactics games—with some mechanical crunch: moving around is intuitive but, to make up for your lack of control over the Y-axis, you choose whether to aim at the head or body with the mouse scroll wheel. The hardest adjustment was the whiplash I felt every time I pressed the right mouse button, which I usually expect to bring my gun at the ready, but here swings my body around 180 degrees. The shortcut is presumably there to make aiming easier, but it threw me off during our brief hour or so of playtime pretty much every time I aimed.
Top down blasting
We started in Team Deathmatch and the game is fairly lightweight. Weapons pack a punch, there are health packs littered around and because line-of-sight is shared and you can only see what your team can see, there's a logical realism to Project Arc's visual information even though the game isn't really that realistic at all. Characters have a weapon, sidearm, a unique gadget and you can switch operators between deaths. One character with a P90 became an early favourite, but I quickly found myself vibing more with someone kitted out with an M4 assault rifle and a grenade launcher.
Later, in the game's Demolition mode, I discovered that Project Arc owes more than a little debt to Rainbow Six Siege. The attacking team chooses one of four spawn locations and then pushes in to plant an object at the A or B objective. This map took place in a hospital and was full of crawl spaces, destructible walls and hidey-holes. The defending team can make this more difficult by placing barbed wire and explosive traps throughout the corridors and reinforcing destructible walls. This is more tense stuff than the respawn modes we'd led with: die and you're dead for the round, and often a round is decided by one cataclysmic fight, whether it's an ambush or a smart room take.
Since close-quarters, destruction-heavy shooters like Project Arc are all about map knowledge, I wish I'd gotten the chance to learn the map before Krafton's kill team tore us apart. Our defenses were torn to shred every round, and incursions often led to us getting picked apart from corners we hadn't yet felt out.
Regardless, it's easy to see that the fundamentals of Project Arc are solid, even if they are mostly Rainbow Six Siege's fundamentals. It liberally takes the coolest bits from Ubisoft's long-running tac FPS: destructible walls, barbed wire, an operator that can hurl gas canisters everywhere but also has a non-functional gas mask just to psych players out. There's even a guy with a hammer that can Kool-Aid Man through walls.
The PUBG influence is much less pronounced. Besides one of the characters gaining access to a blue zone grenade that messes with everyone inside it, there's not much to do with the venerable battle royale game here. In fact, as someone that played a thousand hours of PUBG back in 2017 and 2018, I didn't even know there was a PUBG universe.
With some polish to the controls and a proper onboarding experience, this could be a genuinely fun, highly accessible tac shooter. The link to the battle royale is meaningless and Project Arc comes across like its own world attached to PUBG purely by circumstance, but this feels like a lightweight option for players who can't get invested in something like the sprawling horror of modern day Rainbow Six Siege.
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