Escape from Tarkov review

Every time I make a kill in Escape from Tarkov, it's over in a flash. This is not down to skill. Sometimes in Tarkov you'll be sitting there minding your own business when two players blithely walk by, no idea you're there, and even with a pop gun it will be the easiest double kill you'll ever score. Death is almost always instantaneous in Tarkov, and it's everywhere.

The last thing you do after a kill is loot the corpse. Nearby players will have heard the shots, and scavs in particular will swarm to the area. You might as well have sent up a flare. Start sorting through those pockets and you're dead meat. I bravely hide in a nearby corner, watching the corpse, and mentally run through my next steps. Give it 30 seconds, give it a minute, and more often than not comes the pitter-patter of scav steps towards your loot pinata. Snap, crack, bushwhacked. Tie another one to the racks, baby.

I hear Michael Stipe's voice in the distance when I die, too. Escape from Tarkov is, a lot of the time, pure punishment. I've been rubbish at a lot of shooters, but so rarely does one rub it in your face with such unadulterated glee before crowing: "get better." The biggest tribute you can pay to Tarkov, probably, is that you want to get better.

That's worth pausing on right at the start, because so much of what I'm about to say of Tarkov will make this game sound like an exercise in masochism. And it can be. But Tarkov also offers a kind of high-stakes precision to PvP that doesn't exist elsewhere outside of the most hardcore milsims, and does it within an RPG-lite wrapping of incomplete information and outright obfuscation.

I've played Escape from Tarkov many times before. This game first released as an alpha in 2016 and, while I wasn't in at the very start, the core was always there. Brutal precision shooting and labyrinthine maps married to an Excel nerd's wet dream of an inventory and loot system, and atop this a spider's web of bottlenecks and quests that will make you comb every inch of Tarkov like a sociopathic roomba.

First steps

The introductory experience is a lot better than it once was. The full release of Tarkov now has what qualifies as a genuine tutorial, even though what the game has to teach you is so vast and un-graspable for hours to come. The depth of Tarkov's movement and shooting systems is unmatched, from controlling your exact walking speed, to lean-outs, sight adjustments, different types of blind fire, and how weight and injuries affect everything. When you're crouched in Tarkov, and you stand up to begin walking or running, there's a notable delay before the movement speed picks up, because the game is simulating your character getting off their knees to an upright position.

You will be starry-eyed at the amount of button combos splashed-up on the loading screens, the seemingly endless options for tweaking every variable that exist. But that may also be because you're looking out of a window while Tarkov takes eight minutes to find a match.

So the basics. Right at the start of Tarkov you choose whether your main character (your mercenary) will be part of the USEC or BEAR forces: essentially stand-ins for NATO and the Russian military. This character will be your focus throughout Tarkov, where all of the inventory management and consequence is concentrated, and each time you take them in you'll need to equip and armour them at considerable expense.

As well as this character, you can enter Tarkov every 20 minutes or so as a scav: a 'free' character with a capable-if-crappy loadout that spawns at different points on the map. The goal as a scav is to get in, get something (ideally by killing a merc at extraction and nicking their loaded backpack), get out, and then give it all to your main character.

You choose a map, and one of two times of day to load into that map, and—after what is usually a lengthy wait—spawn in. From here it's anyone's guess, but the first thing you will learn is that Tarkov's combat is incredibly precise, and death isn't just around every corner: it's in every bush, behind every doorway, and everywhere around you. You just have to accept that you're going to die a lot to begin with, and often leave entire sessions empty handed.

Dasvidaniya, comrade

This is Tarkov, welcome! And you'll have to swallow a whole lot more: expert scavs camping extract points, teams of mercs that will stakeout one location and cut you down instantly in crossfire, the distant crack of a shot that fatally wounds your character… and then the ignominy of slowly bleeding out, your character's breathing raggedly turning into gasps, their movement slowing to a crawl, to the point where a bullet to the head is a mercy.

And that's during the day. Tarkov's nighttime raids are more terrifying than Alien: Isolation. Light is deadly, using a torch is begging to be shot, and you're apparently surrounded by elf-eared sociopaths with night-vision goggles. On one occasion I heard shuffling nearby, and stayed quiet as a mouse. But soft-bellied loser that I am, I must've made a noise. Everything was silent, and I strained to hear any movement. Then a monotone voice said "boo" and, before I could even spin the camera, I was shot in the back of the head.

One nice quality of life feature is that Tarkov now heals new players for free for the first ten levels (or 30 raids). Healing is yet another layer of complexity on Tarkov's dizzying internal systems, whereby the injuries your character receives are persistent after raids, and you have to pay resources or items to fully heal damaged limbs and the like. The game will also let you wait it out with a mobile-style timer.

When I first got into Tarkov there was no such leeway for newer players, and the game felt like it was punishing you for trying to learn. You either spent way more resources than you should staying healthy, or just constantly scavved it. Tarkov is already so forbidding, so much to get your head around, that automating elements like this (for a while) makes complete sense, and no-one should have an issue with new players getting free heals between rounds.

Tarkov does make you realise how much almost every other shooter holds your hand, sometimes in ways so common we don't even realise. Case in point: you don't get a map in Tarkov (you can sometimes find them). You're thrown into these places and have to learn landmarks, extractions, and good loot spots through trial-and-error. You will die learning where Scavs are likely to spawn, and next time you get near that area—which could be many hours later—feel your fingers tense over the keyboard.

Slowly memorising maps, and acquiring a gut feel for how these twisted landscapes tend to play out, is one of the moment-to-moment joys in Tarkov; the kind of mechanical depth that really makes you appreciate the beauty of this blasted, burned-out and hopeless place. Yes, you can spend half your life in-game and half alt-tabbing, but at that point why are you even playing Tarkov?

Then there's the inventory and loot management, an absolutely byzantine system of everything from toilet paper to stewed beef to GPUs that feeds into your upgradeable hideout, trader missions and eventually the player-led flea market (which unlocks at level 15).

You wouldn't believe how pedantic this gets. If you've got a gun with 0 ammo loaded, for example, and a bunch of that gun's caliber of ammo, you'd think that selecting "reload" on the right-click menu would reload the gun. Your naivety is endearing, leetle westerner. What you have to do is "unload" the gun's empty magazine, find the magazine in your inventory, fill the magazine with bullets, and then and only then reload the weapon.

There are downsides to such a baroque system of wheels-within-wheels, endless timers, and cyclical inventory/loadout management. The stash is always your enemy, never big enough, always demanding huge investment to get to the next level. The constant inventory tweaking and stock-checking can be a grind. It improves as you grow more familiar with the items and systems, but there are always times you're bottlenecked on one stupid thing, or just want to play without visiting five separate screens to put together a decent loadout.

That goes for Tarkov more generally. This game gives you back what you put into it, but there's no denying it's an enormous timesink and, at times, you'll spend entire evenings achieving nothing of note. It is a game that is comfortable with punishing players, and it will do so for the most minor of missteps.

It gets easier, of course. You gradually internalise Tarkov's petty but logical ways, and understand that almost every problem has a five-step or maybe a seventeen-step solution. I'd go so far as to say if you're not really into shooting and just absolutely love menu management, this might be like the World Series.

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Eating glass

Escape from Tarkov is a very specific game for a very specific type of player. The reality is that Tarkov, for all its brutality and brilliance, has been out-manouvered in places by the younger generation of extraction shooters, which do offer some similar experiences in a much more bitesized and friendly form. Escape from Tarkov's excellence can be buried under so many layers of needless busywork that, sometimes, you do think it'd just be easier to load up Arc Raiders.

But if you want an absolutely amazing core gunplay experience where you have to spend 15 minutes rearranging suitcases before another go, then boy do I have the game for you. And even that is to do Tarkov a disservice, because the consequences are the point. There's an undeniable frisson to finding valuable loot, killing other players, and extracting in Tarkov that no other shooter of this type matches, a stomach-tightening sense that this matters and you have to make it count.

This is a game that, every so often, inspires almost physical sensations. In the novella More Pricks than Kicks, Samuel Beckett goes into extraordinary detail on a character called Belacqua's lusted-after lunch: two slices of burned toast spread with salt, cayenne pepper and mustard, filled with the smelliest piece of gorgonzola he can find. That character ends his brief cameo happily:

"We live and learn, that was a true saying. Also his teeth and jaws had been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the exploit."

Putting a score on Tarkov is like putting a score on a crazy story you once read, but can't forget. A piece of the experience lodges in your mind. It is not yet known whether Belacqua has Escaped from Tarkov. But he's the type alright.