What should a mobile shooter be like? There are certainly different opinions about it, but generally what comes to mind is a fast, frenetic, immediate experience equipped with a control system capable of combining precision and simplicity.
Well, we had the opportunity to try the new title produced by Tencent, discovering that it actually does not correspond to any of these characteristics. So, having shelved early access which turned out to be too sparse to draw any conclusions, we waited for the servers to open to get as clear an idea as possible of what it really is. sand break.
The sensations, however, have not changed: in its attempt to bring a formula as close as possible to that of Escape from Tarkov to iOS and Android devices, the game has forgotten to respect some fundamental concepts of mobile gaming: we will talk about that in it Arena Breakout Review.
Structure: interesting formula, but...
The concept behind Arena Breakout is simple: commanding a soldier created through an editor, we will be recruited from time to time into a team made up of three elements and sent to a map with the objective of eliminating enemies but especially the collect weapons and valuable items, which will be extracted by going to the appropriate areas of the stage.
Is the booty the crux of the matter: both from the point of view of personal improvement, therefore obtaining better equipment than what we have; both from the point of view of exchange and resale, through mechanisms and systems that are activated as soon as level 3 is reached.
Unfortunately, being inspired by the aforementioned Escape from Tarkov, the development team did not consider introducing the appropriate simplifications and automations which are necessary in a mobile game, for a whole series of reasons. On the one hand: if you opened the game during a break of a few minutes, you won't even be able to enter, getting stuck in the middle of one of the many explanations on how to manage inventory.
The latter is probably the most complicated and cumbersome aspect of the game, characterized by ainterface that is anything but immediate, which takes time to understand and digest. Basic aspects like ammunition become extremely strange in Arena Breakout, however you will have to accept it or you will find yourself on the battlefield without the possibility of defending yourself.
Mismo pillage, which represents the heart of the experience, is loaded with useless waiting times to "examine" objects unknown at first sight, which must then be placed in the backpack or as a replacement for the basic equipment if they are better weapons or armor than the ones we have at hand. our disposition at that moment; but even there the management of the interface reiterates its rigidity, along with the poor reactivity of the touch controls.
Around all this there are obviously the microtransactions, with a huge number of packages that are offered more or less insistently on the crowded main screen, full of notifications that cannot be deactivated except by making some purchases, be they weapons, ammunition or simply cosmetic objects with which to customize our avatar .
Gameplay: There is no automatic fire and the house of cards collapses
The structural weight of Arena Breakout, enough on its own to discourage users less prone to patience, is unfortunately not the biggest problem with this production. In fact, although the technical premises of the game are excellent, the control system must face the very serious lack of automatic fire, which causes a whole series of quite serious inconveniences.
We've talked about this a lot over the years: in a mobile shooter there is no point in using a separate button to shoot, because when we target an enemy we certainly do not do it to greet him; and this is even more true in the context of a title where ammunition is scarce and vitally important, so wasting it to chase the opponent in question with a burst seems foolish.
That's not all: this type of extremely outdated approach involves an adaptation of artificial intelligence that turns hostile units into static puppets, unable to move and implement minimally sensible attack strategies, because it is clear that in that case we would have no possibility to react having to first move and aim, then politely ask the other party to stay still while we pull the trigger.
It goes without saying that the game is substantially impoverished and trivialized by this approach, which only lends itself reasonably well to long-range shooting with the precision scope, but which collapses like a house of cards as soon as the context asks us to carry out dynamic combat, between ammunition and wasted fingers. that intertwine and curses fly high in the sky.
Technically speaking
As mentioned above, on a purely technical level, Arena Breakout is solid, despite a host of distinctions. In fact, if the modern war setting has influenced the shooter genre for several years, it goes without saying that the vast majority of the assets that move on the screen seem generic and have already been widely seen. Furthermore, you pay for quality: already at medium/high settings, the game tends to overheat even latest generation devices.
In short, there is no graphic flash, the unexpected movement, the personality that we find in less stereotypical productions also on iOS and Android; and the same goes for the sector Sonoro, with its English dialogues that explain, explain, explain things to people who might want to spend those minutes playing.
Conclusions
Tested version iPhone digital delivery app store, Google Play Price Free Holygamerz.com 6.0 Readers (2) 8.0 your voteArena Breakout adopts an interesting formula but not very suitable for a mobile context, even more so considering that the developers have done very little to optimize its mechanisms and lighten its structure so that the experience is more immediate and digestible for users who are usually used to it. to fast and frenetic shooters, which can be played even during a break of a few minutes. Beyond the extreme cumbersomeness of the interface, there is also the mortal sin of the lack of automatic shooting, which drags down the entire gameplay, transforming battles into a parenthesis as static as it is frustrating between one loot and another.
PRO
- The formula certainly has its point.
- It certainly doesn't lack content.
- Technically solid, although generic
AGAINST
- Really too slow and cumbersome.
- Without automatic fire, the gameplay suffers greatly.
- It doesn't respond very well and already overheats at medium settings.
