Some preliminary thoughts before we circle back.
Image credit: Panic
I’ve been playing Arco on and off for the last few weeks on Switch and PC. I’m loving it – I think Arco’s pretty wonderful. But the builds I’ve been playing on are also rather buggy, and I haven’t been able to get to the end, either because of show-stopper bugs or random crashes.
What we’re going to do in this case is hold back the review until next week, when I’m able to play retail code and know how the final thing runs. Until then, I wanted to give you a brief taste of what this game is like and why I think tactics fans should be excited. Hopefully next week we’ll find that the final code is a lot more stable.
I’m going to focus pretty tightly on the combat today, which is an absolute gem. Just to set the scene, though, Arco’s a Western story of indigenous people and greedy colonisers, and it plays out across a number of acts with the player shifting between different roles in each act. You take on missions and move from one area to another, helping people, fighting, and generally learning the story of this place.
The aesthetic is beautiful ragged pixelart with tiny characters and vast horizons, and a lot of the beats of the story unfold a bit like they do in something like FTL. You’ll chat with someone and you’ll get a kind of WhatsApp stream of what’s said. You’ll see something glinting in the underbrush and you’ll be asked if you want to risk reaching for it. Maybe it’s a necklace, maybe you get bitten by a snake. Here’s a bridge – do you want to fish? Do you have any bait? This is how Arco unfolds.
And then there’s combat. Combat in Arco is genuinely brilliant, I think, even if it took a while for it to fully click. It’s one of those games, like Frozen Synapse, where both sides plan their moves and then you execute them at once, so as much as you’re trying to defeat your foe you’re trying to counter what they haven’t done yet. Fights generally pitch you against a group of enemies, and hovering over each enemy shows what they’re going to do next. Are they going to move or attack or even just wait?
Into this scenario, you then try to insert yourself. Like I said: it took a while to get used to. Arco uses a system of extendable lines. It plays out in open arenas with no tiles or hexes, and instead you extend a line out from your character and click where you want to move. You can kink the line slightly to avoid incoming attacks, and once you’ve selected where, within your current range, you want the line to terminate, you can select your own attack from a growing selection. Equally, some characters I played as could pull off a dash move, and since most moves cost Magia, the game’s magic resource, you can also choose to stay where you are, which allows Magia to rebuild more quickly.
The fun of all this comes from the attacks – yours and your enemies – and also environmental dangers. In the second act, for example, I was playing as an archer, which meant that I had an arrow that I could use to deal damage when enemies were in range, but I also had a lot of fun plugging enemies as they moved just in to range as our turns unfolded. In a game of near-perfect information this still felt like gambling. My arrow was no match for gunmen’s fast moving bullets, but if I kept my distance I could still duck out of the way in between turns, the bullets frozen in flight until we all moved again.
One particularly memorable encounter saw me and a gunman at different sides of the map – they were out of range for my arrow, but their bullets would hit me if enough turns played out. The solution was to kind of tack back and forth: I zigged and zagged, getting closer to them each turn, dodging incoming fire until I could finally get a bead on them. Chuck in upgrades, like an explosive arrow that takes two turns to the hit the ground but causes massive splash damage, or a split arrow that pings off in multiple directions, and even the simplest encounter gives you a lot to think about.
Finally, chuck in stuff that’s in the environment. Late in act two I found myself in a cave, massively overwhelmed, but also in the presence of two pieces of wildlife. One would restore all my Magia instantly if I hit it, and the other would send out little projectiles in every direction once disturbed. The spatial complexities of the game expanded massively. I was dealing with incoming fire, timing my own attacks, managing my Magia, and also making the most of the environment. Arco’s full of stuff like this.
One last thing before I go for now: it’s brisk. Battles are busy and quick to conclude, and there’s an ingenious guilt system which tracks your actions within the game and then will send a ghost, or manifestation of your guilt, after you mid-battle. These ghosts don’t seem to respect turns, and they move for you relentlessly like the baddies in It Follows. It’s an ingenious way of tying multiple parts of the game together and also ensuring that you don’t linger too long and disrupt the flow of things. Lovely.
This is the spot I’m in with Arco, then. It’s absolutely fantastic, but I just want to make sure that the bugs I’ve encountered are not present in final code. I’ll be back next week with a proper review.
