5/5 ★ – Denmother's review of Escape From Tarkov.

The pits of hell where my soul will toil for eternity. Why? Because I made the mistake of playing it. Now there are two groups of people, people who try this game, hate it, and uninstall. Then there's the people who try this game, fall head over heels in love with it, hate it, but realize that there is no game in existence right now that will ever be quite like this one and so they stay and keep playing. This game is utterly amazing on paper. It's a hardcore raid style FPS. You have a stash to store all your gear and items, and a hideout to continually upgrade that can give you certain buffs and unlocks crafting abilities for very useful items. There is also a trader system, all out of raid, with multiple different vendors selling just about anything you could want and different things you either pay for in cash or you pay with barter items that you either find in a raid and extract with or produce from your hideout. You load up your gear and go into a raid. There's multiple maps to pick from, each with their own unique setting with unique hotspot areas. What you do in that raid is up to you. Maybe you are there to loot and find some items that you need to upgrade your hideout. Or, maybe you're there to run around the entire map putting markers on tanker trucks. Maybe you are there to rush towards any gunshots you hear and PvP. In every raid you have some kind of objective but the most important one is arguably not dying, because if you do, you lose everything you had with you. Everything you brought with you into the raid and everything you might have found while you were there. Whether it's players or the aimbot AI scavs, or forgetting to bring something to heal a heavy bleed and bleeding to death, there's a whole lot of things that can kill you i this game, and very easily. That's the "hardcore" aspect of it. It is unforgiving. It's all too easy to go on a losing streak and watch as your stash slowly empties into nothing and you lose all your gear and have to start from square one again. One of the absolute best features of this game is the gunsmithing mechanics. You can customize every functioning piece of your weapon, altering the stats of your gun, the accuracy, the recoil, the handling, etc. In the time you spend just learning this game, you could have beaten 5 modern day story RPG campaigns. And even still you will always be learning. There is so much to it with the absolute steepest learning curve I've ever seen in a video game, and I sure have played a lot of video games. At the time of writing I have 2300 hours and I still learn things about this game. What I've written is only the surface and does no justice to this game as you'll never truly understand unless you play it yourself. So why is it so, so miserable? Two reasons. First, the cheaters. Imagine PUBG and think of the amount of cheaters it has except in this game dying actually matters a lot because it can potentially set you back hours of progress. The larger majority of the playerbase cheats in some way be it simple ESP/walls or aimbot or both. Secondly, BSG simply does not fix their game, not in a timely manner. And when they do fix something, it breaks something else. Audio issues, God awful networking issues, memory leak issues, game balancing etc etc. These are all issues that persist and continually get ignored and when they fix a problem, it doesn't last for long and breaks again. The title of this game is a spit in your face, it's Nikita laughing at us. Because there is no escape. You will play this and see how amazing it almost is and how much potential it has but the rampant cheating issue and all the patches that this game desperately needs will slowly eat away at you and you'll want to leave. You'll want to leave so bad and you will. You'll try to get away and play something else and maybe you'll even have fun for a while but inevitably you will think about this game and accept that there is nothing else that could make you feel the way this game does. No other adrenaline rush, no other rush of dopamine when you get a kill or extract with fat loot or finally complete a quest you've been working on for days or finally find an item you've been looking for for weeks. You'll play other games and they will feel empty because it's not the same intense feelings. And then you'll go back. And you'll play, and you'll play raid after raid getting one tapped by a neckbeard incel who cheats because he has a 2 incher and can't handle being bad at the game or sells accounts and you'll play raid after raid crashing, stuttering, and getting disconnected. Please save yourself, don't do it.