Arcrunner is a roguelite cyberpunk-themed shooter developed by Trickjump Games Ltd.
I’ve reviewed a fair amount of roguelite games on this website, they are basically becoming the default genre of the current generation, much like platformers used to be in the retro days. In many ways, it’s somewhat freeing, especially for indie developers. It allows them to create a large game with a lot of content, by developing a good procedural system and lots of different loot, the gameplay essentially takes care of itself.
This freedom though can come with some setbacks. For a roguelite to be good, the basic gameplay loop has to be good. It has to be engaging, and give you a reason to keep playing and dying, to keep pressing forward and slowly unlocking more and more until you’re able to master it. Unfortunately, Arcrunner ends up decidedly average in that regard.
Let’s start off with the basics. The game takes place on this space-station come city, in which rogue AI has infected everything and turned all the robots on board against you. One AI managed to wriggle free, and has revived you to take on these hordes. You encompass a personality, choose a class, and are then unleashed upon the world.
The gameplay takes place from a third person perspective, and is ostensibly a shooter. There are a wide variety of different basic weapons, from shotguns to machine guns, which become rarer variants with various effects as you progress and loot. You blast your way through the stage, and can then pick an upgrade. These can be things such as shields, missiles which shoot periodically, to support items like radar and jumping upgrades. There is admittedly a quite wide variety of upgrades, and each one augments your character in some way, with a visible change corresponding to the upgrade.
The negative though, is I just didn’t find the basic gameplay loop very compelling. You sort of just mindlessly shoot away at these robotic enemies, that pop in randomly around you in each stage. It doesn’t feel very exciting taking out an enemy, and I always felt on the backfoot, even far into the dungeons when you normally start to feel really powerful in roguelites.
There’s also a couple weird performance issues too. I played on the recently released PS5 version, which you would think would be more than powerful enough for a game like this. It mostly runs fine, but when you shoot certain weapons or enemies die, there’s a weird stutter or little pause, like the game is taking a second to work itself out. It means it never feels smooth enough, and you can often get hit in these little stutters which can be frustrating. This isn’t Digital Foundry so I can’t tell you exactly what is going on, but if I can notice it from basic gameplay without any kind of specialist equipment, the average player will notice it too.
The overall graphical style and music of the game is quite good though. I like the cyberpunk flair the game has, and the game world can often look quite interesting, though it does get repetitive after a while. The game will definitely appeal to some gamers, but for me, there are better options out there in this genre. Not to mention, a sci-fi roguelite releasing on the platform that gave us Returnal, one of the best entries ever in this genre, will no doubt bring criticality on itself.
You can purchase Arcrunner on the PlayStation Store here. For a completely different type of game, why not check out Trainline Express.
