I’ve been playing Arco on and off for the past few weeks on Switch and PC. I love it – I think Arco is pretty great. But the builds I’ve played are also pretty buggy and I haven’t been able to complete the game either because of show-stopping bugs or random crashes.

In that case, we’ll hold off on the review until next week when I can test the retail code and know how the final product runs. Until then, I wanted to give you a quick taste of what this game is like and why I think tactics fans should be excited. Hopefully next week we’ll see that the final code is much more stable.

I’m going to focus heavily on the combat today, which is an absolute gem. To set the scene, Arco is a western story about natives and greedy colonizers that spans multiple acts, with the player switching between different roles in each act. You take on missions and move from one area to another, helping people, fighting, and generally learning the history of that place.

The aesthetic is beautiful, jagged pixel art with tiny figures and vast horizons, and many of the storylines unfold a bit like something like FTL. You chat to someone and get a sort of WhatsApp stream of what was said. You see something glittering in the undergrowth and are asked if you want to risk reaching for it. Maybe it’s a necklace, maybe you’ll get bitten by a snake. Here’s a bridge – do you want to go fishing? Do you have bait? That’s how Arco unfolds.

And then there’s the combat. The combat in Arco is really brilliant, I think, even if it took a while to get the hang of. It’s one of those games, like Frozen Synapse, where both sides plan their moves and then you execute them immediately. So you’re trying to beat your opponent, but at the same time you’re also trying to counter what they haven’t done yet. Battles generally pit you against a group of enemies, and hovering over each enemy will show you what they’re going to do next. Will they move or attack, or just wait?

This is the scenario you then try to fit into. As I said, it took me a while to get used to. Arco uses a system of extendable lines. It is played in open arenas without tiles or hexagons. Instead, you draw a line from your character and click where you want to move. You can bend the line slightly to avoid attacks, and once you’ve chosen where you want the line to end within the current range, you can choose your own attack from a growing selection. Likewise, some characters I played could sprint, and since most movements cost Magia, the game’s magical resource, you can also stay where you are, allowing Magia to be rebuilt more quickly.

The fun of all this comes from the attacks – yours and your enemies’ – and also the environmental hazards. In Act II, for example, I played as an archer, which meant I had an arrow to deal damage with when enemies were in range, but I also had a lot of fun hitting enemies that came into range over the course of our turns. In a game with near-perfect information, this still felt like gambling. My arrow was no match for the archers’ fast-flying bullets, but if I kept my distance, I could still dodge between turns, freezing the bullets in flight until we all moved again.

One particularly memorable encounter had me and a gunner standing at opposite ends of the map – they were out of range of my arrow, but their bullets would hit me if I played enough rounds. The solution was to somehow cross back and forth: I zigzagged, getting closer to them with each round, dodging fire until I could finally get them in my sights. When you throw in upgrades like an explosive arrow that takes two rounds to hit the ground but deals massive area damage, or a split arrow that ricochets in multiple directions, even the simplest encounter gives you a lot to think about.

And finally, things that occur in the environment. Late in the second act, I found myself in a cave, completely overwhelmed, but also in the presence of two wild animals. One would instantly restore all my magia if I hit it, and the other would shoot small projectiles in all directions if disturbed. The spatial complexity of the game increased tremendously. I had to deal with incoming fire, time my own attacks, manage my magia, and also make the most of the environment. Arco is full of this kind of stuff.

One last thing before I go: it’s fast-paced. The fights are hectic and over quickly, and there’s an elaborate guilt system that tracks your actions in the game and then sends a ghost or manifestation of your guilt after you mid-fight. These ghosts don’t seem to respect turns and move relentlessly for you, like the bad guys in It Follows. It’s an ingenious way of tying several parts of the game together while also making sure you don’t linger too long and disrupt the flow of the game. Nice.

So that’s the situation I’m in with Arco. It’s absolutely fantastic, but I just want to make sure the bugs I found aren’t present in the final code. I’ll come back next week with a proper review.