I've been playing Arco on and off for the last few weeks on Switch and PC. I'm loving it - I think Arco's pretty wonderful. But the builds I've been playing on are also rather buggy, and I haven't been able to get to the end, either because of show-stopper bugs or random crashes.
Arco Publisher: Panic Developer: Franek, Max Cahill, Bibiki, Fayer Platform: Played on PC and Switch Availability: Out on 15th August on PC ( Steam , Epic ) and Switch . What we're going to do in this case is hold back the review until next week, when I'm able to play retail code and know how the final thing runs. Until then, I wanted to give you a brief taste of what this game is like and why I think tactics fans should be excited.
Hopefully next week we'll find that the final code is a lot more stable. I'm going to focus pretty tightly on the combat today, which is an absolute gem. Just to set the scene, though, Arco's a Western story of indigenous people and greedy colonisers, and it plays out across a number of acts with the player shifting between different roles in each act.
You take on missions and move from one area to another, helping people, fighting, and generally learning the story of this place. The aesthetic is beautiful ragged pixelart with tiny characters and vast horizons, and a lot of the beats of the story unfold a bit like they do in something like FTL. You'll chat with someone and you'll get a kind of WhatsApp stream of what's said.
You'll see something glinting in the underbrush.