Escape from Tarkov review: "An extraction shooter that will make you truly miserable if you let it, but can offer dizzying highs you won't find elsewhere"

Escape from Tarkov set the standard for extraction shooters. If you've played Arc Raiders or one of the other success stories in the genre, this FPS might feel familiar: you go into a dangerous map filled with a combination of AI and real-life opponents, fill your bags with loot, and hustle towards an exit. Extract and you get all your loot, which can be used or flogged off to traders and other players. Die, and you lose everything.

I hate it. I love it. But the key thing is that while it's a deeply clunky game, Escape from Tarkov's shootouts are perhaps the best in video games, and the feeling of limping into an extraction point with empty mags and a bag full of loot is something that's kept me coming back for the last decade. With 5000 hours already spent in Tarkov, I'm having a fresh start to see how the game's long-awaited 1.0 release holds up.

Mechanically sound

Escape from Tarkov is a brutal, uncaring game that doesn't care much whether you make it to the extraction zone or not. Deaths in Tarkov will often feel unfair but they usually teach a lesson, even if the lesson is "people shoot from that window" or "condensed milk is not good for hydration."

Picking a loadout involves not just selecting and outfitting your gun but also remembering to bring magazines for the gun and to load those magazines with ammunition, in addition to loading your pockets with spare rounds for when you inevitably need to top them back up. Those rounds all do different amounts of armor penetration, and some of them will be more accurate or have a higher chance to cause a bleed while some could even make your gun malfunction.

Gear maintenance involves not just repairing your armor, but occasionally pulling out damaged plates and replacing them with new ones. You'll update your hideout along the way, scavenging wires and bulbs to make yourself a little home away from home.

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If you're listening to this and salivating, congratulations. Escape from Tarkov is for you. Still, there's a learning curve that's near-vertical in your first 100 hours of play. The reward for this time and perseverance is phenomenal moment to moment gunplay and deep progression that rivals most MMOs.

Huge realistic maps make firefights feel more real, as you'll push through building sites, abandoned city blocks and even lumber yards in pursuit of loot. These environments make sniping and longer-distance combat feel more interesting than nearly any other live game that I've seen, while being peppered with submachine gun fire in derelict shopping mall Interchange offers close-quarters intensity that few games truly capture.

The brilliance comes from pairing low time-to-kill with deep mechanical complexity – bandaging a wound mid firefight, or having to desperately feed bullets into a magazine your life is about to depend on.

War economy

Escape from Tarkov's secret sauce is the player-driven economy underpinning every aspect of it.

Every piece of loot has genuine value and when you learn that a simple roll of blue tape might make you big bucks, your rucksack suddenly seems like less a bag of different items and more a series of different dollar signs. At first you'll just pick up anything shiny-looking – and honestly, anything you can wedge into your bag – but you'll soon learn there are items much more valuable: long-range optics are particularly prized in those early stages of the game, but at any point I will fight like a cornered animal to extract with just a single screw to improve my hideout.

That pressure exerts itself in a lot of unique ways. The desire to get high-value loot will force you to make stupid choices, even if you think you know better. The fear that you might lose a load of valuable gear also amps up the tension and can make even simple fights feel like desperate struggles.

Get your hands on a set of Level 6 armour and you'll be nearly impervious to damage to your torso, but you can also sell it for a big stack of cash, which might be a smart option if you think you're likely to get killed and lose it all.

Ammunition is a commodity too. Good bullets are expensive and hard to come by, and that means you'll often try to kill someone in one or two shots rather than half a magazine. When money is tight it's not a matter of how much firepower you can point at a problem, but how much you can afford to spend on a fight when you know another could be minutes away.

As your character levels up from extracting and completing quests, you earn cash and better standing with in-game traders that lets you buy better gear – meaning many of these shootouts are asymmetrical, creating another layer of risk versus reward as you never know who else is around the corner.

Hidden knowledge

Escape from Tarkov's final release adds a tutorial that aims to imbue all of that knowledge into the players, but it really only gives a surface-level overview of a game that will drown you if you're not prepared.

Tarkov does a terrible job in general of explaining how to stay alive or find success, but the perfect microcosm of this is the medical system, with the tutorial being the only time they can show you how to patch yourself up properly when you're not bleeding to death. But which bandage do you need for specific injuries? How do you treat a broken arm? Operate on a damaged limb? You need a lot of knowledge to survive in Tarkov, and the game refuses to hand any of it to you.

This is something you see more when you've stopped bleeding to death every five seconds. Escape from Tarkov outright fails to signpost the maps. You can (and likely will) learn these with a map open on a phone or a second monitor, but the game makes no effort to show where most of the evacuation zones are and I find it hard to believe many players would stumble upon them without the help of a third-party website.

Quests offered by traders are also poorly signposted, and so if the Escape from Tarkov Wiki ever does go down, expect people who do know how to do the quests to become valued for their rare knowledge like the mountain guides of old.

Want to know how to find and repair the two specific tool panels you need to fix in a factory filled with them? The factory filled with enemies including a 6-foot tall giant with an automatic shotgun and a sledgehammer who is just waiting for you to check a guide? Don't worry little one, I will show you the ways of old.

Whether intentionally or not, Escape from Tarkov is a power fantasy where the players with the knowledge and better gear have an advantage. Technically any player can kill any other, a single 9mm bullet to the face will take care of pretty much every issue, but as more experienced players have every possible advantage, it's a digital meritocracy that has replicated the problems inherent in the system.

Despite my enthusiasm for Escape from Tarkov, this 1.0 review isn't what I was hoping for. I wanted the full release to be the capstone update that completes the game that made extraction shooters happen. Instead, it feels like an incremental update that has quietly axed many of developer BattleState Games' plans for the game. Several skills promised to come in the final addition have never materialized, and promised maps have been cut back too.

The 1.0 update brings a huge visual overhaul to the game's Interchange map, and there's a heap of extra content in the form of a story mode and a ton of different guns.

Yet performance is spottier, and I've noticed the game crashing more – outside of some slowdown there hasn't been much to hinder my enjoyment, but it is annoying that the "final" version of the game rarely feels like it.

The most baffling inclusion in the 1.0 release is the ability to visit the traders and talk to them in their own habitat. This means the tiny little profile pictures that players have been gazing at for years have been given life, but you'll only actually go to talk to them when you need to see them for one of the story quests that were also added in the final release.

Because you can only do these quests by talking to the traders in their 3D spaces – while others can be turned in via a menu – it just feels confusing and unnecessary. The result is two functionally different quest systems that work differently and don't cross over. This is Escape from Tarkov's big 1.0 addition and it's a dud. Luckily, it's backed up by a game that's already phenomenal.

There is a slight elephant in the room in that, despite the fact they look the same and technically are the same game, the PvE and PvP versions of Tarkov are different animals.

PvP, the version of Tarkov you get by buying the game outright, fills each map with a combination of AI enemies and real-life players. There's a real joy to be found in outsmarting other players, although Escape from Tarkov's steep learning curve means you're likely to spend a lot of your time getting blasted from weird angles.

Escape from Tarkov's DLC PvE mode is a bit slower and more meditative. The shootouts are just as intense but the PMC characters – which are usually played by other real players in the base game – are controlled by AI, with a random selection of equipment and loot. These PMCs seem to flank and push smartly in 1.0, but any AI in Escape from Tarkov can quickly take you out if you're not careful.

This version of Tarkov, a mode that I migrated to myself about six months ago with the launch of Escape from Tarkov's "hardcore wipe" and found fits my 36-year-old reflexes a little better.

You lose the dizzying high of outsmarting a player and taking his stuff, but it's easier to play and doesn't require you to sacrifice your whole life to the arms race that typifies Escape from Tarkov's PvP experience. The player-base is split over which version is better, but having spent 100s of hours in each, I think it's really down to personal preference.

However you choose to play it, Escape from Tarkov is ultimately a game about kicking over sandcastles. Embrace this – the highs and lows of killing other players to take their stuff and then being killed by other players so they can take your stuff – and you'll have fun. This is the promise all extraction shooters offer, but it's distilled to its purest form here, an extraction shooter that will make you truly miserable if you let it, but can offer dizzying highs you won't find elsewhere.

Escape from Tarkov's 1.0 release is a slight disappointment, but the core that makes it shine is intact and worth the time of any FPS fan curious to try it out for themselves.