Arena Breakout: Infinite Beta Impressions: This Is No Mere Mobile Port

Arena Breakout: Infinite is both an economy and a video game. The point-to-point action is a pure first-person shooter. You will be deployed into a few abandoned acres of countryside—similar to the ghost towns of Urzikstan or Erangel—and be asked to shoot your way towards extraction with as much loot as possible in tow. Of course, once you and your friends return to the main menu and have converted all of that booty into cold hard cash, you’ll be confronted with Arena Breakout’s vast marketplace, gleaming with cosmetics, firearm attachments, or even just a few extra clips of ammunition. It aims to be a game about getting rich and staying rich when one stray headshot might take it all away.

Arena Breakout aims to be a steely military simulator, with no Call of Duty-style acrobatics or titanic Battlefield set pieces. You craft a grim soldier in the character creator and outfit them with a knapsack of survival gear, which all needs to fit, like Tetris blocks, within your limited inventory. (Generally speaking, you’ll be bringing body armor, a backpack, a wealth of food and medical supplies, and yes, lots and lots of ammunition.) Over the course of a match, our hero may grow hungry, or thirsty, or need the bullet in their arm to be removed. With luck, you will have brought the perfect antidote for all of those tasks, avoiding an untimely end to the campaign.

In that sense, Arena Breakout might remind you of the venerable survival-sim DayZ, where the player’s marching orders are to hunker down and survive for as long as they can until the zombies inevitably come for their brains. But instead of an inevitable dirge towards destruction, Arena Breakout instead partitions its matches into 30 minute chunks, where our job is to gather a whole bunch of loot locked away in safes and coffers around the map before heading towards an extraction point to get out of Dodge. It’s a formula that adds a good amount of flexibility for playstyles—both the maniacs and the campers will have plenty to love.

It also certainly helps that Arena Breakout looked categorically gorgeous on my four-year old PC. Infinite is developed by Level Infinite and is a spinoff of a hugely popular mobile shooter with the same name. Going in, I expected a good amount of iPhone jank interfering with the action. But that wasn’t the case at all. The maps here are finely detailed and rich with exploitable angles and coverage, and the total draw distance rivals what you might find in more prominent open-world multiplayer shooters. But most impressive of all might be the gun-nut obsessiveness with which you can customize a whole range of firearms to meet your exact build. Shotguns, bolt-action rifles, machine guns, pistols, all completely modular and malleable—and all rendered beautifully when protruding from the bottom of your screen.

Arena Breakout is PvPvE, which is to say that in each match you play, you’ll be finding a swathe of easily dispatchable bots bumbling around the outskirts of certain important chokepoints. (You’ll take them down with ease, but don’t expect them to be carrying much loot.) I like that Infinite always provides us with something to shoot at, considering this sort of shooter formula can get bogged down in the doldrums pretty quickly. Furthermore, the marketplace, where you offload your riches, is a game unto itself. Every item in the Arena Breakout inventory seems to hinge on a sliding scale of supply and demand. Did you spend most of your time in World of Warcraft being a shark at the Orgrimmar auction house? Well, we certainly have a shooter for you.

But this also gets to my only real anxiety about Infinite as it stands. Arena Breakout is about scoring loot, and ratcheting up thresholds of lethal material, turning your character into a progressively more effective killing machine. But some of those gearing thresholds are punitive. Superior ammunition tiers are necessary for penetrating stronger armor, so to stay ahead of the curve, players are incentivized to dump a lot of time and effort into their extraction runs. Will that grind grow punitive over time? Especially when all it takes is one unlucky ambush for you to lose everything you’re carrying? So far, I’ve enjoyed walking the tightrope that Arena Breakout is stringing out for us. Let’s just hope we don’t fall off.