Escape from Tarkov

Survival game with elements of first-person stealth shooter and RPG in a visual style of post-Soviet Union, set in the fictional city of Tarkov. Players make raids into different areas of the city in search of valuable items, putting maximum effort into survival — it's not enough to find loot, it needs to be brought to the evacuation point.

The task is not easy, as Tarkov is a deadly environment: there are no rules and everyone is on their own. At any moment, from anywhere, a bullet can fly in, and the situation is worsened by various levels of enemy bots and threats like radioactive contamination. Since 2017, it has been in closed beta testing.

Escape from Tarkov belongs to an alternative reality of the "Russia 2028" universe, created by the developers for Contract Wars. Specifically, Tarkov is located in the south of the Karelian Isthmus in the fictional Norvinsk region, which was a free economic zone of the Russian Federation and the EU.

The city was confidently developing until the international corporation TerraGroup was exposed for conducting illegal research and experiments. A political crisis erupted, leading to the isolation of the region by UN peacekeepers and the Russian army.

While politicians argue, TerraGroup hired the private military company USEC to protect its laboratories, personnel, provide armed cover for illegal experiments, reliably conceal secrets, and counter attempts to investigate the company's activities. In response, the authorities of the Norvinsk region hired the private military company BEAR, close to the government structures of the Russian Federation, to prove TerraGroup's criminal activities.

There is no open world in the game; instead, there are large unique maps with a high degree of freedom of movement, each with a predetermined theme. The "Factory" consists entirely of production facilities, workshops, and shops, including several levels of "verticality." The "Forest" map, on the other hand, has a couple of buildings and is immersed in dense forest, offering survival in open spaces.

In 2020, almost nothing was known about the plot of Escape from Tarkov, except for the developers' promise to add a full story in the future. Events will begin in the midst of a war between two private military companies, with civilians fleeing, chaos all around, giving the writers plenty of room. For now, players are satisfied with side quests from traders.

The main mechanics of Escape from Tarkov are:

The game begins with choosing a side of the conflict (USEC or BEAR), after which a character is created and their appearance is customized. The character is constantly in the Hideout, which conceals the game menu, venturing out from there into raids.

You cannot go on a raid with a "naked" character; first, you need to decide on all the gear: weapons and a sufficient supply of ammunition, grenades, medkits and painkillers, food, and water. The inventory size is limited by volume and weight, so you need to find a balance, but over time the inventory expands. Everything that is lacking can be purchased from traders or other players.

The game has dozens of skills divided into categories: physical, mental, combat, practical, and others. Skills are leveled up passively — the more you handle weapons, the better you shoot, the more you survive — the easier raids become. Each faction will receive unique skills in the future, making gameplay more diverse.

The Hideout is the character's base, where they heal wounds, recover, and store all the loot obtained in difficult raids, and it also levels up. The player starts in a cluttered damp basement, but by spending resources found in the game, they transform it into a comfortable autonomous underground dwelling, with a storage area for resources, a workbench for crafting items, and a shooting range to test these items in combat.

As of 2020, Escape from Tarkov offered two main modes: