Lost Light

Lost Light, developed by the Chinese company NetEase, is an extraction shooter game that bears a striking resemblance to Escape from Tarkov, though it has a simpler game design. In this game, players can choose between four maps and their objective is to gather as much loot as possible and complete various quests before successfully extracting at designated extraction points.

As players venture through the Operation zone, they may encounter other players known as “fireflies” or AI-controlled bots called “marauders.” The marauders are generally easy to defeat and serve as a good source of starting loot. However, some of them, especially boss bots, can present a tougher challenge.

Moreover, players have the option to enter a match as a marauder themselves, equipped with preset gear. This approach is advantageous for money farming without the worry of losing one’s own gear in the process. The mode is especially fun because you can train to fight without the risk of loosing your equipment.

Quests grant money and items and are given to you by various NPCs. Items can upgrade your shelter or be used to craft new gear. Money becomes more important if you aim for the ranked mode and leaderboards.

The game offers a wide array of weapons that can be customized to suit your playstyle. Some attachments are rare, making loot from defeating other players valuable

I’d recommend this game for playing with friends, especially the pc mobile crossplay team function after you reach level 5. Cheaters are still an issue, despite developer efforts. Nonetheless, the game holds great potential for the future. I do hope that the “pay to win” aspect with the premium subscriptions for more storage space, etc doesn’t take overhand.

Arena Breakout

Arena Breakout is a mobile first person extraction shooter published by Level Infinite (part of chines mobile game giant Tencent Games) and developed by Morefun Studios. This is, atleast for me, the best extraction shooter for mobile devices at the moment. There is just nothing that’s so similar to EFT and so realistic to compare it to.

In Arena Breakout, your goal is to extract with maximum loot while taking out enemies. Plan your gear, raid duration, and playstyle – stealth or full confrontation.

Choose between Tactical Ops or Militant in Covert Ops mode. Tactical Ops allows gear from storage, while Militant offers preset gear with no risk of loss (similar idea to Lost Light). Covert Ops has a 15-minute cooldown, providing risk-free looting and potential encounters with real players.

There are 4 maps, each offering unique raid environments. Snipers excel in open maps like Valley or Northridge, while SMGs shine in Farm, the smallest map. Some maps have a “Lockdown Zone” mode with entry fees, valuable starting gear, and better supply spots.

The game also offers a detailed weapon customization feature, storage system and a quest system. The only downsights are the missing skill based matchmaking brackets. This can lead to frustrating skill differences but most of the time you just end up meeting people with better gear.

Pubg Mobile

After venting my frustrations about the PC-version of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds due to cheaters, bugs, and skill issues to my friends, I decided to revisit the mobile version another try. That was around 1 year ago. Surprisingly, I had a lot more fun there. PUBG: Mobile, being one of the most successful mobile shooter games with massive esport-tournament prizes, is impressively optimized and runs smoothly even on older phones. Especially the fact that the basic game installation doesn’t require much space and all gamemodes can be optionally installed is really good for older phones.

The game offers classic multiplayer mode, various versions of the Battle Royale experience, and an extraction shooter mode. Like many mobile games, skins can be purchased, but you also receive cool-looking clothes or chests as free rewards for completing weekly events.

Compared to the PC-Version, the mobile version is much more accessible for newcomers. For advanced mobile shooter players, ranked matches provide more challenging gameplay. Playing with friends enhances the experience and allows for better strategy coordination.

PUBG: Mobile can also be played through emulators on Windows devices but you won’t get matched into the same ranked brackets as mobile players.

Call of Duty: Mobile

CoD:M is, as the name suggests, an adaptation of the popular console and PC games. The game offers different multiplayer modes such as Search and Destroy, Team Deathmatch and Domination but also has a battle royale mode and a time limited zombie event mode.

Unlike the game mentioned above Cod:M has a very simple weapon customization feature but because of this is a game for the average mobile player. If you want more of a challenge, both multiplayer and battle Royale offer a ranked mode where you can play against players of your skill level.

The game is regularly updated with new seasons. They offer a battle pass (BP) with skins for both characters and weapons, ingame currency and other rewards. The premium BP can be purchased to earn more rewards. In addition to the BP there are also seasonal events that reward free skins. Skins can also be acquired by just playing the game through the completionist skin system.

Another way to get rewards is through the clan system. Each week you play against other clans and compete in challenges to see who can earn the most points. The winner earns more of a clan currency that can be later used to purchase weapon skins in a special store.

In general CoD:M is one of the best, if not the best performing shooter on market at the moment, especially because they earn so much money from gambling like ingame chests or lucky draws that are basically rigged against you. If you ignore this huge money aspect of the game, the gameplay is really fun and won’t get repetitive if you play with friends.

Organize your storage asap

After every extract try sorting out magazines for weapons you don’t usually use. Keep in mind to unload the ammo if it’s good quality ammunition. Do keep a few weapons that don’t cost much to use in “naked runs”, basically a raid where you go into the raid with only one weapon and hopefully extract with full gear.

Check how much space a backpack takes up: Sometimes backpacks take up less space than they offer inside. This can be used to gain more storage slots.

Fold the stocks on your weapons! Some weapons, especially SMGs have foldable stocks that can be folded to decrease the storage usage of a weapon. Same goes for unloading magazines from guns. Some DMRs take up two rows of storage with and only one row without a magazine in them.

If you have too much healing items just use them in the health screen instead of paying for your health treatment like you would normally do.

You can purchase storage expansions: Check the Buy option at the contact “Evita”. She offers multiple trade options for expansions of all size and type. Just click on the “Fill” button to purchase all needed trade supplies from the market. Note that this means the price of an item is going to change over time.

Use the right gamemode

If you don’t want to risk loosing your gear on a solo run don’t do it. Try the cover ops gamemode that provides you with premade loadout to fight your way through a raid. You spawn disguised as a militant and don’t get shot at by other militants as long as you don’t enter a hotdrop or you engage in battle first. If you get real luck you can scavenge all the player loot lying around and extra with a fat stack of new items.

To summarize: Dress appropriate for your goal. If you just want to loot play covert ops or go into the raid with low end gear and no expectations. If you want to grind missions equip good armor but also invest in good ammunition and mags to reload.

Same goes for the lockdown zone gamemode. Don’t play this if you aren’t at least in a two-man team as you’ll have no chance against bigger squads if you’re going in solo. Enemies here have even better gear than in normal raids but the loot is also way better. AI militants do more damage as well but also reward you with plenty new rigs and armor.

Think before acting

Arena Breakout is a realistic shooter. That means that in most cases you aren’t able to push in, shoot everyone and extract alive. You will have to carefully make your way into a better position, plan your attack and hope the enemy didn’t spot you. It takes just a few high level bullets to end your run.

We recommend sticking to the areas outside the hotzones at first to get a feel for the game and to only explore the very player active areas once you got a good sense of the game and are confident in taking fights.

Search for teammates

Playing the game solo is possible but not always the best idea as you for instance have no additional cover while looting. Another advantage of playing with teammates are better tactical possibilities during a fight. One player can flank around the enemies while others face them head on.

Teammates are also a great way to prevent loosing gear as any of your lost gear they extract will be send back to your storage.

The best gun isn’t going to win a fight

Ammunition plays a huge role in Arena Breakout as higher tier ammo has a better piercing effect than lower tier. Let’s take 7.62×39 ammunition as an example. This ammo is used by the SKS or the AKM and you can see why good ammunition is important here: the gray, tier 1 piercing ammo does 60 damage while the golden tier 4 piercing ammo does 80 base damage. Keep in mind that the higher the piercing tier, the higher the final damage output will be. A militant inside the lockdown zone can be taken down with around 5 tier 3 piercing (purple) ammo while it takes a good half magazine (~15 bullets) to eliminate them with the tier 1 ammunition.

Get to level 18 as fast as possible

At level 18 you unlock the weekly quests from Joel. These reward you with lots of experience points for basically just playing the game. Most of the time it’s about eliminating a certain amount of people, going into raids, extracting and selling goods on the market.

At the same time always keep track of your dailies. These daily quests are a great source of experience points, especially at the beginning of the game.

If you have any other useful tips or feedback for the provided ones feel free to leave a comment below this artice.

Arena Breakout is a mobile first person extraction shooter published by Level Infinite (part of Tencent Games) and developed by Morefun Studios. We already covered the game some days ago with a first look article after its release on July 14.

Since then, I’ve played for 19 hours, both in duo and solo sessions, completing 49 raids. So far, I’ve reached level 18 and visited the first 3 maps to complete various missions.

Game Appearance

Arena Breakout can be played in multiple graphic quality settings and FPS configurations but it still offers a good map appearance on lowest settings compared to other mobile shooters like COD: Mobile or Lost Light.

The audio quality is really crisp and you can hear every move of your enemies, if you turn the volume up. The gun sounds are realistic and it’s easy to differentiate the type of gun someone is using.

Gameplay

In Arena Breakout your goal is to go into a raid and extract with a much loot as possible while taking out enemies. Because the game is a hardcore extraction shooter, meaning that it’s very realistic and you have to plan what gear you’re taking and how much time you want to spend in the raid, what your goal is and if you want to go stealth of full on confrontation mode.

You can either enter a raid as a tactical ops or as a militant in covert ops mode. While in tactival ops, the “normal” mode you can take gear from your storage into the raid. As a militant you get an assigned set of gear and therefore have no risk to loose any of your items. The covert ops mode has a 15 minutes cooldown and offers a risk free looting experience. Sometimes you can even eliminate real player and leave with a fortune of loot.

At the moment there are 4 maps in the game that each offer a different sized and difficulty raid environment. That means that some kind of weapons like snipers are more suited for open maps like Valley or Northridge while SMGs are best used on Farm, the smallest map at the moment. Some maps even offer a “Lockdown Zone” mode that requires you to pay an entry fee and to carry more valuable starting gear but also has better and more supply spots.

Valuable items can be acquired either through looting other players or militants or more commonly through chests and other storage items such as jackets, medical cases or even fridges. Opening one of these will take a certain amount that increases, the bigger the storage gets. After that you also need a certain time to identify what items were found. This most of the time leaves you exposed to enemies and you’ll have to listen very carefully while looting.

At the end of each run you have multiple extraction points marked on the map that can be used to get back into the main menu with all your acquired gear. Some points are always open while others have a chance to them if they’ll let you extract. Others even require you to leave with no backpack or other requirements.

After each raid you’ll have to organize your storage to fit all the new loot. This gets a tedious, especially in the beginning. After some playtime you’ll be able to expand your storage to fit more items. All items take over a certain area of squares inside your storage and can be moved around to your liking. The game also offers an auto organizing features which I highly recommend using as it groups all items into categories, making it easier to search for a specific item.

Progression and Grind

You can learn lots of features from the ingame explanation screens and from the tutorial at the beginning of the game. More advanced game features and play techniques can be learned via youtube videos.

At some point, you’ll unlock the gunsmith feature, which allows you to modify guns to your liking using various parts. You can for instance switch sights, equip a new magazine or even put a longer barrel and place it on your gun for more range. The possibilities are endless but I found myself rather left alone figuring out how to build weapons and would like a more in depth ingame tutorial for that aspect of the game.

The game offers a more or less steady increase in difficulty with different maps offering more and better loot but also stronger geared AI soldiers and better equipped players. On your leveling journey you’ll unlock better quality ammunition and weapons that can be purchased at the different Contacts (quest + merchant npcs) through trading. This sometimes offers a cheaper alternative to the market as some players like to take advantage if an item isn’t broadly available. The market is a communal economy space where players can sell and buy items such as weapons, armor or even miscellaneous items that are required for quests or contact trading.

Contacts also offer the main source of experience points: Missions. These are tasks that need to be completed to earn XP and most of the time even money and gear. Some require you to visit a point on a certain map or to place an item at a designated spot. Others task you to go retrieve certain items from a location or to eliminate an amount of enemies in a certain area. Some of them are challenging but they always somehow manage to make them challenging but not impossible.

There is also a Battle Pass in the game that rewards you with items and which levels up with the same experience points as your normal player level. The only difference is, that you are only able to level up the battle pass 10 ranks each week unless you have purchased the second premium variant for around 15€. The first premium variant of the battle pass costs around 6€ and grants you access to additional items and appearance items.

Another very important point for me are the events which are currently taking place and are announced for the future. These event tasks in combination with missions introduce you to every aspect of the maps and game principles over time.

Frustration and other problems

As I want to provide an honest review that’s true to my experience, I also want to briefly mention the problem with skill differences in the game. There is no skill based matchmaking (SBM), meaning that you don’t always play against other player on your level of experience. Sometimes you are even matched against teams of multiple players. That results in sometimes unfair and even impossible to avoid situations that lead to frustrating moments. Especially when you loose good gear or can’t complete certain quests. Don’t get me wrong: I do understand that players with better gear are more likely to extract but I would love to see SBM at least in the ranked mode.

What often killed my mood during playing this game are the campers that literally occupy a single building for 5 minutes straight, waiting for you to loot your teammates or to extract. In addition to that, people have apparently figured out how to hack in Arena Breakout as we’ve met some players that for instance lock on to your head while your sitting in a bush 150 meters away.

In the future of the game I also hope to see a more balanced and mistake-friendly looting experience. At the moment there is close to no opportunity to get medical supplies that can fix broken bones once you’re inside a raid. Other medical items such as Medkits are also hard to come by so you have to rely on other players carrying them around. Another aspect of this is the frustration you get when opening a enormous weapon case only to find one empty magazine.

On the other hand new weapons and low level armor are pretty easy to come by as you can go into match with only a knife and sneak yourself towards the nearest AI soldier.

Conclusion

Get Arena Breakout here

Arena Breakout is a first person extraction shooter made for mobile devices. The game was developed by Morefun Studios and publish by Level Infinite. It was released to the wide public on July 14 just a few days ago. Today we share our first impressions and opinions on the game with you.

First Impressions

The game has a rather long introduction tutorial that helps you with the basic game mechanics. You get introduced to contacts, that give you access to missions with goals that need to be completed and reward you with gear and items. The game gives you a good idea of inventory management and how to collect and sort your gear and materials. You also get thrown into your first “real” match before the tutorial ends. At the beginning the controls feel a bit snappy but they can be easily configured to your liking.

Your goal for each run is to gather as much loot value from materials and dropped gear of defeated enemies and to extract successfully. Throughout the match you’ll meet other players and AI soldiers that you can either avoid by going stealth and trusting the game to mark any noises on your compass. On the other hand you can take them out with a well placed shot or two. Just watch out that you keep enough ammunition in your inventory

Every time you extract you earn experience points that contribute to your level. The more you level up, the more features and contacts you unlock. This adds a smooth development and also prevents a new play from being overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities.

Check out some screenshots from the first hours of gameplay we went through below:

Take a look at the official global launch trailer on youtube below:

Things we enjoyed

Many things feel such as the character creator or the lobby feel similar to games like PUBG: Mobile or Lost Light. This allows the average mobile fps player to quickly configure the controls and find all the important settings. On the other hand in the beginning this made me question the quality of the game. After some playtime I was pleasantly surprised, that the game is well made and fun to play. Unlike the games mentioned above Arena Breakout pulled of an amazing and a bit simplified mobile version of the popular pc extraction shooter Escape from Tarkov.

The cool thing about Arena Breakout is that it’s an actual mobile game that can be enjoyed on the go as it uses pretty much no mobile data (around 80mb for 1h of gaming).

Another important points are the amazing graphics. At some point I wasn’t able to distinguish between a low performance pc game or a mobile game. Along the graphics the menus are well designed and logically constructed.

There are lots of events in the game that provide a great way to earn well built weapons and gear like backpacks if you died inside a raid. In general the game is pretty forgiving at the beginning.

What parts of the game can be improved

As the game run pretty well and I enjoyed myself I don’t really see any major negative points to mention here. My minor issues include a pretty bad battery usage to performance optimization. Arena Breakout used around 2 times more of my battery compared to playing games like PUBG: Mobile.

Another luxury would be a slower approach to the complex magazine and ammunition management. Being introduced to basic game mechanics first and getting to know the different kinds of materials slowly would feel more natural to me. Maybe I’m just spoiled by simple shooter games I do want to add, that there are multiple ways to learn about features inside the game like the Instructor Q&A.

Get Arena Breakout here