Roguelite, permadeath, class system, cyberpunk, shooter – a third person one, in this case. Many of the overused tropes and keywords of our days are to be found in ArcRunner, but it’s also a vibrant and action-packed title that seemed worthy of our attention.
And so, here’s our review for ArcRunner!
Familiar cyberspace
After the most generic of premises of a rogue AI wreaking havoc and us being the only folks who can stop this madness, it’s not long before we’re thrown into a cyberpunk city where we can walk through the first corridor-esque neon-lit streets with a handy tutorial to get the basics of ArcRunner. And those are certainly sound: a competently made third person shooter module with dashes, various abilities, and a weapon with unlimited ammo, though one where the magazine has to be reloaded from time to time.
The movement itself isn’t the fastest, though the feeling of velocity can largely be increased by cranking up the FOV (field of view), but the shooting feels satisfying for the most part, even though it lacks any aim assist on a controller. The premise, in these early streets, is simple. Enemies of various kinds, ranging from little flying drones to humanoid robots with melee or ranged weaponry, will be spawning for a few waves, before the door opens up and we can go on. Nothing we haven’t seen before a thousand times already.
There isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre, with a handful of extra staircases and hidden corners offering loot in the form of different weapons or tools. Weapons can be of many kinds: pistols, assault rifles, snipers, even heavier weapons like grenade launchers or a crazy addictive disc launcher, throwing projectiles that keep bouncing around on the map for a long while, creating a beautiful and violent dance in its wake. That and the shrapnel gun, a glorified shotgun, have been my main allies in many runs.
As for the tools, these are cooldown-based abilities that go from simple grenades and stun traps, all the way down to decoys to confuse your AI foes, auto-fire turrets and more. As the levels progress, these tools don’t really get stronger, whereas higher numbers and extra perks can be found on further guns that crates and enemies litter the areas with.
Gone rogue, again
The roguelite aspects of ArcRunner come in many forms. One is how the levels are randomly generated based on tiles, though the architecture variety is very low. Levels end with a selection of augmentations that players can add to their various limbs, adding all kinds of extra abilities and perks, such as armour getting partially recharged at the end of each area, damage bonuses while using a certain skill or improvements to the effectiveness of various types of elemental damage. There’s even additional jumps and jetpacks that can be used, making the combat more dynamic and vertical.
Naturally, permadeath plays a part too, and you should be particularly wary of it. Sure, players can unlock all sorts of useful permanent unlocks after the runs, increasing their individual stats, gaining additional abilities or even a second weapon slot. However, there aren’t any checkpoints or starting points. Each of the game’s various biomes offers multiple levels that have to be beaten in a row, and players can’t just restart after a boss either: it’s back to square one, every single time. This can be a bit infuriating on more advanced runs, as the early areas become easier after powering up but they still take a good chunk of time to complete. At least our most used weapons, after a certain amount of kills, become permanently selectable in the armoury, allowing us to begin each run with our favourite tools of destruction.
It is this grind and repetition that is, ultimately, the game’s biggest flaw in my eyes. The combat is fun enough, though not as exhilarating as something like Arcadegeddon, though the generally tight level designs and relatively low player speed don’t quite allow for high-octane manoeuvring – instead, it often boils down to running around in circles or using a few key elements of scenery to hide behind and abuse the wonky enemy AI. Though watch out what you use a cover for, as various elements can be destroyed and go out with a large bang that damages everybody, player included.
As the stages go on, a lot of the enemies start having large shield pools to wear down, or weild very hard to avoid projectiles, and in some cases are even protected by a different enemy that needs to be killed first. The sheer amount of foes in some arenas makes these repetitive combat encounters go long in the tooth.
At least the levels do shake up the formula a little bit from time to time, offering different objectives like defending a terminal or destroying turrets instead of the regular waves of enemies. Likewise, the occasional short alternate routes often offer challenges, ranging from beating a certain amount of enemies in a limited timeframe while in the air, using multi-kills, and so on. The reward in this case is usually a choice between healing up, points to spend after death or a cool weapon.
What do we do here?
In terms of visuals, the game finds a smart compromise between not particularly detailed and intentionally quite blocky 3D models, which are certainly light on the powerful Xbox Series X we tested the game on, while using much of the computing power on blinding lights, shiny surfaces that seemingly do raytracing very well, all while keeping a rock steady 60fps even when playing at higher FOVs. Enemies themselves aren’t always the most readable, though players can unlock various skills to make them visible, displayed through walls as red outlines, with their projectiles even shown on the screen at all times with a handy radar – the issue is therefore at least partly sidestepped. A quick mention to the game’s electronic soundtrack which, while hardly really standing out, gets the cyberpunk AI theme going with nice beats.
So what’s the content outlook here? Players, either alone or with the help of a friend in local play, can get through the many levels it takes to beat the story on multiple difficulties and with all kinds of classes, ranging from assault, ninja, hacker and more. It’s unlikely that a player manages to reach the end credits on first try, meaning there’s longevity in here, but the limited variety of the combat scenarios and level designs hampers the desire of replaying it all, especially when the rewards for doing so are weapon unlocks, extra skills and whatnot for challenges we already played through anyway. Still, do expect at least 10 good fun hours of ArcRunner, anything beyond that depends on how much you like this adrenaline-fueled grind.
Won’t win awards for originality, but…
I’d like to say something more original or outstanding about ArcRunner, but in so many ways it’s as generic of a cyberpunk third person roguelite shooter as it gets. Solid visuals, a decent soundtrack, enjoyable but not outstanding gameplay, though impacted by a low variety that becomes evident when grinding through near identical scenarios one after another.
And yet, I had a great time with this game, with tight difficulty and risk vs reward gameplay making it an enjoyable way to pass a couple evenings in this relatively unexciting April of new releases. If you need some mindless action that plays and looks pretty good, do keep an eye out for this one.
ArcRunner
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Cool cyberpunk style
- Enjoyable combat
- Lots of weapons
CONS
- Grindy and repetitive
- Low variety in gameplay
- Not sure there's a single somewhat unique idea
