Quest design encourages further toxicity because it often requires you to kill people in certain creative ways, and the easiest way to resolve most of these situations is to lay in a bush and shoot people in total silence. The Escape From Tarkov community is unfortunately filled with complete arseholes, meaning every now and again when you kill another player you'll get a friend request from someone that will lead to them telling you to kill yourself because of some perceived slight. Playing with friends, there's always a perceptible bitterness when you're the one that finds high-tier items like a graphics card, golden lion or rolex, and the game suddenly becomes less about finishing the stated goal of the run - often murdering NPC Scavs or picking up/putting down an item somewhere on the map - and more about getting you and your precious cargo off of the map so you can sell it. 'Pineapple Juice is 50k now and I didn't realise till I drank some :(' is another. 'I've just upgraded my toilet to max level' is a text I have received in the last week. This meta-game merry-go-round, initially appearing to be little more than a sideshow from the smash and grab looting of the first few runs, soon becomes the primary aspect of the game.

However, it does add a frisson of excitement when you find a can of fuel on an enemy player, knowing that it's going for 700,000 Roubles instead of the usual 150,000, because the pretend currency in the real world is making the even more pretend currency in the pretend world sell for megabucks. This means the in-game economy is constantly in flux, with graphics cards, fuel and even pineapple juice skyrocketing in price as players scramble to get the pieces to keep their Bitcoin farms running.Д«itcoin - in the real world - is a barely concealed pyramid scheme that's destroying the planet. A Bitcoin can be sold to an in-game merchant for a number of roubles that's tied to its real-life value. My favourite part of the game is that one of the game's big-ticket items is Bitcoin. The best trick Escape From Tarkov has up its sleeve is the way that it contextualises the loot and shoot gameplay, so you care about every CPU, water filter or even USB charger you find along the way. Still, once you've graduated with your degree of not dying instantly from Tarkov's bloody syllabus, it's actually quite an enjoyable romp.

Tarkov is probably the most 'hardcore' shooter currently in development, with all the positives and negatives that come associated with that.

In addition, your armour will degrade, in line with the caliber of bullet you're shot with and the ballistic profiles of the particular round: the same gun could fire different rounds that either ping harmlessly off your armour or blow a hole in it and kill you near-instantly. On top of this, you have to manage a fairly robust medical system that simulates fractures, pain and the effects of starvation and dehydration. Die, and you lose everything you bring in with you. For the uninitiated, Escape From Tarkov is a survival game that takes the rules of battle royale and supersizes them - you choose what you take into each 'raid', before trying to complete quests, loot valuable items and kill enemy players and NPCs.

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