Developed and published by Morefun Studios, Arena Breakout: Infinite is an upcoming tactical extraction FPS, and it targets one of the toughest genres out there. With plenty of tactical extraction first-person shooters out there that have dominated the genre for years like Escape from Tarkov, Ready or Not, Vigor, Arma 3, Squad, and many others, it is not an easy genre to get into however the developers at Morefun Studios seem to be cooking something really special in their labs because we got our hands on their latest closed beta for Arena Breakout: Infinite and we had a blast playing it. This is our preview of Arena Breakout: Infinite on PC in which we try to survive raids in beautiful locations and craft some of the coolest weapons.
Naturally, the closed beta of Arena Breakout: Infinite offered a limited number of gameplay modes, maps, and features. Since this is going to be a free-to-play game, many of the Season Pass mechanics were not in the game either. The two game modes on offer were Tactical Ops and Covert Ops and both of these modes were pretty much the same thing, but they differed in an important aspect. In Tactical Ops, you played as an Operator and had to take in the equipment you purchased with your own money. While in Covert Ops, you dropped in as a Militant with a pre-defined inventory and had to scavenge weapons and other items from the battlefield.
While both game modes shared most of the gameplay elements with each other, bringing your equipment and dropping in with nothing but a basic supply pack made one hell of a difference in gameplay. But since this is a tactical shooter, this means that the greater the risk, the greater the reward. When you deploy into a mission with your gear purchased with your own money, if you die, you will lose everything and this means your armor, your backpack, your weapons, and everything else that you are currently holding but if you manage to survive and extract successfully, you earn great loot and monetary rewards at the end. I mostly spent my time during the closed beta in the Tactical Ops because it felt more rewarding at the end even though I lost tons of my favorite weapons and gear by dying.
My favorite mode in Arena Breakout: Infinite is also Tactical Ops because it gives greater freedom of what you can take into the battlefield. Pre-game preparation is vital in the game because the better you are equipped, the more chances of survival during a game. Arena Breakout: Infinite is not your typical shooter game where you just pick a class, and weapon and jump into the game or like a traditional Battle Royale game where you must scavenge everything from the battlefield. Even in Covert Ops, you start with some basic weapons and items, so you are fairly well-equipped right from the start of the game. Pre-game preparations require you to take into consideration every little thing that you might need in the battle.
You have to carry weapons, ammo, magazines, armor, attachments, food, energy items, throwables, storage, and medical items with you. Everything takes space and you can only take a handful of things depending on your equipped backpack. Forget anything here and you will have a tough time during the game. I remember in one of my earlier games, I refilled my magazines with ammo but forgot to put some extra ammo in my pockets which caused me to run out of ammo during the match and I had to switch out my primary weapon because I was unable to find the right type of ammo.
Such problems will often happen to you in Arena Breakout: Infinite because it takes military simulation to another level. You cannot just press R to reload weapons in the game. You must bring the right magazine, the right ammo, and the right weapon with you. Ammo from ammo boxes needs to be filled in magazines first and then you have to drag that magazine to your weapon to equip it. If you have filled magazines in your pockets, you can quickly change mags during a gunfight but if you do not make it a habit, you will be running out of loaded magazines quite a lot. Also, if your current magazine has some bullets in it and you reload, you will lose the half magazine and reload a new one which is also a thing that you need to consider especially since you have to conserve your ammo.
This also becomes hectic if you are caught in back-to-back gunfights in the game. Since you have to loot other players and this is, yet another tedious task and you do not want to be caught by anyone with your hands in the pants of another player at any time. You have to plan and strategize your every move in the game because if you are not careful with anything, you will end up dying and losing everything in your inventory. You can store items in your pockets, chest rig, and a backpack and the available slots will depend on the equipped item. Even with the equipped items, the slots for the chest rig depend on its design.
It may give you some smaller pockets and bigger pockets of two or three slots depending on its design. If an item requires two horizontal slots and you only have vertical slots, you cannot store it and will need to store it in a backpack big enough or find another Chest Rig that offers bigger horizontal slots. In addition, you need to pack ammo, food, medicines, med kits, accessories, and other useful items with you but you also need space with you to bring in loot at the end so you can sell it for money. This makes every choice very critical in the field where you need to decide what to keep because you might need it for survival or ditch an item to store a useless one to sell it later.
Out in the field, whether you are playing solo or with friends, you need to make many strategic decisions as well. You may choose to avoid hot spots, but the best loot is found there and after a gunfight, you need to see if it is safe to loot the other players because looting takes time. You have to manually drag and drop items from loot boxes to your inventory and even then, you have to search pockets, chest rigs, and backpacks separately to reveal what is in them. Each inventory slot has to be examined before you find out what is stored in them, so this takes time. This sounds hectic because it is, but you cannot skip looting at all, so it boils down to your decision-making whether to risk looting another player or keep on the lookout for other players.
Even if you are filled with loot, it is of no use to you until you can safely extract from the Dark Zone. If you get killed, everything is lost including the items that you purchased and brought to the battlefield which makes taking risks even riskier in the game. This is also one of the greatest charms and one factor that makes you play safely and more attentively. The thought of losing your newly crafted assault rifle with the best accessories you can find in the game is certainly a factor that pushes you to take out everyone who tries to harm you. Similar to re-loading and handling weapons, healing is yet another aspect that requires strategic thinking.
First, you will need to allocate proper space for med kits, medicines, painkillers, and food items because they are vital for your survival. Even if you manage to avoid getting shot at all, you will become hungry and thirsty and for that, you will need to drink or eat something. Becoming hungry or thirsty will cause you to lose health and ultimately, you will die so you must reserve some space for food and health. Each match is around 24 minutes and in-game, this is a lot of time for your character to become thirsty.
If you get shot, your character will need to heal the body part where you get shot. If you get shot at an organ or other vital place like the thorax, you will die instantly. However, if you get shot in an arm or leg, this becomes another story. You need legs for running and arms for using weapons. Any of these organs will affect your gameplay if you get damaged so you will need to heal yourself. For this purpose, you can use painkillers to ward off the pain, but you cannot remain alive for long if you are bleeding. For bigger wounds, you will need bandages, and surgical kits to fully heal yourself which again, takes time and you cannot shoot or use a weapon until the entire animation is complete thus making it a critical decision to make out on the battlefield.
Probably my favorite thing to play around with in Arena Breakout: Infinite was no doubt its Gunsmith. This is the only way of acquiring new weapons and it gives you a massive number of options to just play around with and create your very own weapon of mass destruction. After choosing the weapon type from options like assault rifles, sub-machine guns, shotguns, sniper rifles, carbines, pistols, and many others, you can slap different accessories and change them however you want. You can choose muzzles, magazines, scopes, grips, and everything else that can be switched on your desired weapon. Once satisfied, you can craft the weapon and use it on the battlefield. Crafting requires a lot of money but if you are good at the game, acquiring money is not an issue.
Apart from Gunsmith, you can purchase every other item in the game from the extensive marketplace. It features armor, backpacks, medicines, food items, throwables, energy drinks, and everything else that you might need to survive out in the field. You can easily get lost in the marketplace and spend a lot of time without even knowing the amount of content available here. Apart from buying, you will also sell the loot you collect during your raids here for money. Apart from the main marketplace, you can also purchase specialized items from different Contracts, but you will need to complete different missions for them as well. These missions range from using a specific weapon for killings or surviving a specific amount of time and such. You can also earn different rewards for these missions.
The two maps on offer Farm and Valley offered plenty of cool and diverse locations to explore for loot and take out enemies. All different modes were just different variations of these two maps in the beta and the full game will come with additional maps as well. For a shooter, the environments were pretty good and there were plenty of opportunity locations as well such as towers for snipers, tall grass for players who love to hide and ambush other players, and small clusters of buildings for gunfight hot zones. Then there were some cool zones where you could gather your breath, stock up, and heal yourself before heading back into the main zones for fighting. I like how the game added bots to make up for player count but there is no indication of any sort about how many players are currently in the game and how many players are left at the end. The Farm is a close-combat map while Valley offered a more longer map with a more focus on long-range combat.
Apart from this, certain other gameplay elements are also missing such as a crosshair and a mini map. This makes you reliable on your accessories and checking out the map to check out where you are and where you need to go. The game also uses Anti-Cheat to prevent cheaters from messing with the game. There will be additional events in the full game and a Battle Pass sort of element as well, but I did not explore it in the game. It is certainly there but I do not care about such things. I have never purchased a battle pass for any free-to-play shooter game. I am keen to see what new features are added to the game down the development road and how the developer handles the microtransactions moving forward.
Arena Breakout: Infinite feels like it is something from an AAA studio and despite Morefun Studios being a new name in the genre, I enjoyed my time with the closed beta. My colleague Humza Khalid, who manages hardware on GamesHedge and is a first-person shooter fanatic was also really impressed with how authentic and real-time gunplay feels in Arena Breakout: Infinite. The survival elements are tense and how the game makes you choose between either healing yourself or reloading your magazines with ammo before someone else attacks is just great. The game certainly demands more optimization when it comes to performance, but this is natural for Closed Betas. Still, the game ran fairly well on a laptop equipped with RTX 4060 and a desktop PC equipped with RTX 3090. There were no performance dips whatsoever throughout any of the matches for me.
I have come out greatly impressed by my time with the Closed Beta for Arena Breakout: Infinite. Morefun Studios is heading in the right direction, and I am sure that with more content, more weapons, accessories, maps, and game modes, Arena Breakout: Infinite can easily stand out from the crowd. The gameplay feels solid, the pre-game preparation is always tense and the critical decision-making on the battlefield and how you have to stick with the decisions you make are all the right elements of a great extraction shooter in the making. If you are interested, you can still jump into its Closed Beta by heading to the game’s Steam page. As for me, you will find me lurking in the grasses of the full release when it launches later.
