When things go to shit in Arena Breakout: Infinite, they go to shit fast. Each of the 10-15 minute matches in this brutal extraction shooter start the same way: you're stood in a peaceful wooded area with a military-grade firearm, an empty rucksack and a glimmer of hope that this will be the time you find a stack of valuables.

The aim of the game here—and Escape From Tarkov, the game Arena Breakout: Infinite takes liberal inspiration from—is to charge around the map hoovering up loot and heading to extraction. Get lucky and you'll kill a couple of players along the way, taking some of their gear, too. Die, and you lose everything you went in with. In practice, each of these raids is a coinflip on whether you'll survive rich or bleed out. 

Ostensibly you want money for guns, ammo and armour. In reality, you just want to make money for the bragging rights of having a bigger pile of money than your friends. 

The loot you find, the gameplay mechanics and even the keybinds are similar to what you would find in Tarkov. I've played several thousand hours of Tarkov and I slipped into Arena Breakout like a warm, bloody bath. 

Arena Breakout: Infinite is a PC reimagining of Arena Breakout, a mobile extraction shooter. With its PC release, Infinite is now battling with the very game that inspired it. However, it's not quite that simple. Arena Breakout: Infinite has a different philosophy than Tarkov: matches are shorter, maps are generally smaller and the gameplay feels much faster as a result. The lethal firefights are just as quick as anything Tarkov can toss in, but you’re having those brawls more often.  

While Arena Breakout's early access release has only a trio of maps and much less gear than its better established stablemate, even at this stage it offers a much lower barrier to entry. There's a decent tutorial and several quality of life features that seem ready to welcome new players. However, there's no getting around the elephant in the room: Arena Breakout: Infinite has some awful monetisation, and we'll be talking about that in-depth later on. 

Welcome to hell

But first, the good bits. Firefights are frantic and lethal, and death can come in a single round. Close quarters fights are messy and unpredictable, and with so much on the line with each death, it should be infuriating. Instead, it feels exhilarating. 

This is because Escape From Tarkov was never a game just about the shootouts, and nor is Arena Breakout: Infinite. There's a thrill to extracting with a graphics card, broken phone or even a backpack full of toothpaste and flipping them for money on the market. Better yet, the way you have to weigh up whether to use the AK12 you've just found in a raid or sell it for a premium creates a tension that underpins the whole game. It's not just about the suicide runs you'll make through a series of blind spots and ambush points. It's about making a ton of money while you do it. EVE Online, but for armed sociopaths instead of those that fly spaceships. Playing the market in Arena Breakout: Infinite requires a keen eye for the most valuable bits of loot and nerves of steel to get it back to your stash so you can sell the bloody stuff.

Arena Breakout: Infinite's biggest success is that it manages to make the extraction shooter genre accessible without cutting too much of the experience away. There's no getting around that Arena Breakout: Infinite takes liberal inspiration from Escape From Tarkov. However, to help even the playing field, Arena Breakout: Infinite has added a lot of new features. 

The most obvious of these is the addition of an in-game map that marks where your extracts and loot hotspots are. The first stage of learning a new map is now as simple as pressing the M key. You won't learn all the good sniper spots, fatal funnels and annoying bushes that people camp in straight away, but you'll be able to navigate between big landmarks and get yourself out without bother.

Similarly, floating markers will hover over your squadmates heads so you can see which way they've plodded off as you stuff your pockets with loot, and easy in-game radio chat has meant it's easy to coordinate with even random players. End of battle summary screens will let you trace your entire route through the match, while combat recaps will let you see how you killed who you killed, and even tell you how much health your killer had left. 

Inventory management has a lot of tweaks on Tarkov's system too. You can strip a gun for parts and sell it on the in-game player-to-player market with just a few clicks, and there is the ability to roll up rucksacks and bags up so they take up less space.

While these are to make things simpler, several of the more arcane mechanics from Tarkov have been done away with entirely. Weapons don't have durability, mastery or skills associated with them here.  Weapon modding is all present, but as long as you've got a good bullet in your magazine and decent aim, you'll get kills. 

Teammates extracting with your gear will automatically return it to you, meaning carrying a friend's gun out doesn't involve the tedious act of giving it back to them next raid. Better yet, this works even when you're playing with randoms.

Finally, missions seem to be simpler, even at this early stage. I'm level 25, and many of the missions I've encountered have asked me to go somewhere, kill something or bring out a certain amount of loot. I'm rarely punished for dying beyond losing my gear and because the maps are smaller and raids often take between 15-30 minutes, the pace is much faster than many of its extraction shooter brethren. You'll often have one big firefight before you and your squad scarper for the nearest exfil point with the loot, and that makes it very moreish, like a snack-sized Tarkov you can't stop playing. 

This, combined with the tutorials, means even the most unfamiliar of players will go from timidly skirting the edges of the map with a scant selection of loot to visiting the high-traffic areas of the map hoping to turn the other player controlled mercenaries into loot for the taking. 

That, of course, is the fun. Get greedy and visit areas like the sprawling, maze-like Motel or the killing fields surrounding the Stables on the initial Farm map and you're likely to find yourself in a fight for your life. But that's where the best loot and the most tooled up players will be, so time and again you'll venture into this dilapidated crucible to test yourself anew like a modern day gladiator.

More often than not, when you die in Arena Breakout: Infinite it's because you've pushed into a dangerous part of the map, looted a body in the open or ignored the nagging feeling of your gut and gone to scour another room for valuables as time ticks away. It's the greed that gets you. 

Nickel and die

And on the subject of greed, Arena Breakout: Infinite's monetisation is reminiscent of the dark ages of free-to-play games: many of the in-game purchases are made in 30 day chunks, meaning you can buy perks to make your game easier, but you'll have to do it every month. 

Secure containers are a core part of the extraction shooter experience, allowing you a small but safe place to store valuables in the case of your death. This is a huge part of early Tarkov, where you'll scavenge loose bits that are helpful for progression and stash them away for safekeeping. Other games in the growing genre have aped this trend, and it's a slight concession to the fact that, well, you're going to die a whole lot. 

Arena Breakout: Infinite is the same, but there's a catch. You'll have to buy a secure container, and you'll have to fork that cash over every 30 days. There's a two square (2×1) secure container that you can unlock via an event I've not yet encountered in 10 hours of play, but then there's also a four square (2×2) container that you can buy for 500 Bonds ($4.99 / £3.90), the in-game currency of choice for true Infiniteheads. A larger six square container (3×2) can be yours — for 30 days — for just 1,000 bonds ($9.99/£7.82). 

If that's not enough, you can get a slightly bigger case for all of your keys for just 1,600 bonds ($15.97, but you have to buy three different amounts of Bonds just to make that possible). If you have a ton of cash and no idea what to do with it in the real world, you can replicate that in-game by buying Kron (the in-game cash) in a variety of different options. 

Also up for sale is the in-game Elite package, which gives you an extra 150 lines of storage space, ups your weekly limit for selling things on the player-to-player marketplace and lets you list more things on that market at once. That’ll cost you another 500 bonds ($4.99/£3.90) for 30 days.  It also comes with a premium label that you can show to other players, presumably so they know you're the one to go to when they've got a bridge to sell.

Arena Breakout: Infinite is a fun game that I can see myself turning to again and again. However, it's very clear that squeezing money out of players is at the top of its design goals. This isn't technically pay to win—you can still get shot in the face by a player clutching nothing more than a pistol. But it does offer players a way to get ahead of the competition, with more security, more potential to make money and the ability to amass a larger amount of gear to take into raids. If you're not willing to spend that cash, you're probably going to feel like a second class citizen. 

This is a real shame, because I have found myself glued to Arena Breakout: Infinite over the last couple of days, and would usually be happy to drop a few quid on a free-to-play game that I was genuinely enjoying. Thanks to this, they've decided for me that I won't be dropping cash on it for pretty much any reason.

Otherwise, the game gets my stamp of approval. The smaller maps and bite-sized conflicts at the heart of Arena Breakout: Infinite don't feel any less monumentous. While the entire vibe of Escape From Tarkov has always been “this game is hard and you're shit at it, but love us anyway”, Infinite smooths over a lot of those rougher edges and presents a well-polished free-to-play alternative that is bound to win over a lot of fans, both those tired of Tarkov and those wanting to give the genre a try without any prior experience.

With a few more maps and a stack of new weapons, loot and other gear to fight over, it feels like Arena Breakout: Infinite could find its niche. If, along the way, it could ditch its shitty monetisation, it seems like this could be an arena I don't even want to breakout from. 

It'll be on Steam in the future, but for now, you can download Arena Breakout: Infinite's early access version from its official site.