BLOODY BRILLIANT

ESCAPE FROM TARKOV is the extraction shooter's extraction shooter

- Rich Stanton

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.

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