Conceptually?

It is a looter shooter (a shlooter, if you will) cranked up to 11. Since now you need to actually be vulnerable while you spend time sorting through the loot pinata you just shot rather than holding a button to vacuum up all the purples and oranges.

And when you get into an actual gunfight with someone, it genuinely feels like you are in a big budget “prestige” action film as you play cat and mouse, barely miss someone, take a shot to your chest plate, and are frantically trying to wrap a bandage around your arm while listening for footsteps or, even worse, a grenade.

Then you add the humans into the mess and it all goes to shit. Because now? They know where everything that matters for progression is on a map and just camp it. There is no gunfight because they are just aiming at where you head will be when you bend down to get the key you need to unlock a vendor.

So then you need to watch a bunch of videos online to learn where the popular camping spots are for every extraction and objective. Which means THEY need to watch videos to learn where to hide to camp those anti-camping spots and so forth. And, because Tarkov is so hardcore, nobody has any maps or compasses and you need to memorize the layout of every single map visually.

And if you DO luck out and actually get one of those gunfights? Yeah… the other person has been playing the game for 90 hours a week and has L5 body armor that you literally can’t penetrate without half a mag. And they have thermal scopes and armor piercing rounds that shred through your plate carrier instantly.

And that assumes they aren’t just hacking where you get the telltale sound of a burst going from between the center of your head to just above it as your body falls before the audio shuts off.

All that said: Tarkov with the SPTarkov mod is actually fucking amazing. Although you still have the problem of needing to memorize maps because paper maps cost a lot of money and take up slots because The Failed State That Is Totally Ukraine doesn’t have photocopiers or even scraps of paper to jot down landmarks on while staring at one of the few maps in The Legally Distinct And Much Less Interesting Zone.