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.

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.

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In this episode, Brad covers:

Dungeons of Hinterberg
Deathbound
Neo Harbor Rescue Squad
Overboss
Phantom Spark
Arco

…And more!

You can also hear the show on iTunes and Spotify!

Please send feedback and mailbag questions to SoVideogamesPODCAST (at) gmail (dot) com, or post them in the comments section below. Thanks!

I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

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I will always have a soft spot for simultaneous turn-based games. These are the games, taking a cue from the likes of Frozen Synapse, in which I make my move in secret, my enemy makes their move in secret, and then both moves play out at once and there's nothing we can do about it. The pleasure of these games comes from intuiting your enemy's move and foiling it. The humour comes from failing to do that utterly.

Arco takes this idea and makes it sing. It feels a lot more real-time than these games often do. During a battle, I move a cursor around that highlights how far I can move, and I shift through options covering things like heal, shield, and various kinds of attacks. In the Steam Next Fest demo I've been playing, I'm often fighting frogs and bugs, and learning to anticipate when a frog is going to jump and try to squash me and when it's going to explode and do me massive damage.

I am as poor at these games as you might imagine, even though I completely love them. But what gives me an almost-edge in Arco is that running away and getting a bit of distance is a legit useful tactic, because it allows mana to recharge while putting you outside of the radius of enemy attacks. Running away is something I have a natural talent for, and so the first few levels of the game passed in a kind of familiar bliss: I would rush in, try to attack, fumble it, and then leg it again.

Read more