I just spent an hour with Krafton’s latest, Project Arc, a tactical shooter where teammates share visual information and every angle could spell death. Oh, and speaking of angles, it’s played from a top-down view.
Here’s a familiar story: you choose from a team of heroes with varied loadouts before taking turns attacking or defending a bomb site..
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Now, I’m as sick as the next person of hero shooters, but Project Arc is way more about accuracy and positioning than gimmicks. The game’s tactical nuances set this apart from everything else.
The maps are a series of corridors with deadly angles, made more complex by weak walls that can be destroyed, reinforced, or penetrated with bullets. You can also crouch, and toggle your aim low to catch people crouching, at the risk of not seeing someone peeking through a window and training a laser sight on your forehead.
There’s a team deathmatch mode, but this CSGO-style, round-based mode with no respawns is where Project Arc sings.
The vision sharing I mentioned earlier makes teamwork vital. Using gadgets and coordination, you must move like a unit, covering each other’s backs as you breach and clear rooms. It reminds me of classic Rainbow Six, but the top-down perspective gives it its distinct flavor.
Weapon sway, ballistics, and recoil give each weapon a unique personality, and everything feels finely balanced at this stage, even if shotgun deaths are as infuriating as they are in every game ever made since the dawn of computing.
Every weapon feels devastating, with excellent feedback through animations, punchy sound, and scenery reactions.
In one game, I crept through a back window while my teammates kept the enemy pinned down. I stuck a guy with a sticky grenade and melted into the night, backing away into the fog of war. When you pull your plans off, it feels excellent. I’m sure he was as annoyed as I was when he blasted my face off with a shotty.
There’s a lot of potential here for teams of highly skilled players to dominate. The only downside to this is there’s a steep learning curve. You can jump in and play and get a few kills easily enough, but doing it without accidentally murdering your teammates constantly is a different matter.
Controlling a character in real-time from this perspective while also wrestling with the camera doesn’t come naturally to me, but it’s worth pushing through to experience a tactical shooter unlike anything else.
Project Arc doesn’t have a firm release date yet, but you can already wishlist it for PC on Steam, if you’re keen.
