The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege

GamesThird Person ShooterThe first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six SiegeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Krafton)

project arc PUBG

My Project Arc playtest played out like a horror movie. I was skulking around a hospital, my teammates were dead and my enemies were not just in power, but clearly having a really good time running me down. Project Arc is a top-down competitive shooter set in the PUBG universe, and the people I’m playing against in this early playtest are much better than I am.

It’s not my fault. Krafton has decided the best way to let journalists get hold of their game for the first time was to pit them against a team of esports organisers that Krafton had paid to be there. They were more experienced with Project Arc, they knew the maps, and they were hiding in corners and vents ready to kill us the second we lost focus. Every time we entered a room blind or turned a corner looking the wrong way, we’d pay for it with blood. It felt less like a battle of equals and more like the cooling tower scene in Aliens—except the aliens had military grade weaponry and a grudge.

On the plus side, the unmitigated slaughter created an unbreakable bond between the five of us as we came together against the common threat of players we have no business getting matched up against. As I managed to rack up two entire kills versus the other team’s 10, I was reminded of that feeling of trying to learn a game a year after launch, when the players still hanging around are mercilessly good.

Once I got past the one-sided matchups, Project Arc was pretty fun. It’s a top-down shooter—a marriage of genre and camera angle that you rarely see outside SWAT tactics games—with some mechanical crunch: moving around is intuitive but, to make up for your lack of control over the Y-axis, you choose whether to aim at the head or body with the mouse scroll wheel. The hardest adjustment was the whiplash I felt every time I pressed the right mouse button, which I usually expect to bring my gun at the ready, but here swings my body around 180 degrees. The shortcut is presumably there to make aiming easier, but it threw me off during our brief hour or so of playtime pretty much every time I aimed.

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We started in Team Deathmatch and the game is fairly lightweight. Weapons pack a punch, there are health packs littered around and because line-of-sight is shared and you can only see what your team can see, there’s a logical realism to Project Arc’s visual information even though the game isn’t really that realistic at all. Characters have a weapon, sidearm, a unique gadget and you can switch operators between deaths. One character with a P90 became an early favourite, but I quickly found myself vibing more with someone kitted out with an M4 assault rifle and a grenade launcher.

(Image credit: Krafton)

project arc PUBG

Since close-quarters, destruction-heavy shooters like Project Arc are all about map knowledge, I wish I’d gotten the chance to learn the map before Krafton’s kill team tore us apart. Our defenses were torn to shred every round, and incursions often led to us getting picked apart from corners we hadn’t yet felt out.

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(Image credit: Krafton)

project arc PUBG

Regardless, it’s easy to see that the fundamentals of Project Arc are solid, even if they are mostly Rainbow Six Siege’s fundamentals. It liberally takes the coolest bits fromUbisoft’s long-running tac FPS: destructible walls, barbed wire, an operator that can hurl gas canisters everywhere but also has a non-functional gas mask just to psych players out. There’s even a guy with a hammer that can Kool-Aid Man through walls.

The PUBG influence is much less pronounced. Besides one of the characters gaining access to a blue zone grenade that messes with everyone inside it, there’s not much to do with the venerable battle royale game here. In fact, as someone that played a thousand hours of PUBG back in 2017 and 2018, I didn’t even know there was a PUBG universe.

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