Project ARC Preview – PUBG Studios’ tactical shooter from the top-down

thesixthaxis.com:

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