Arkos 1 & 2 demo playthroughs (Next Fest June 2023)
1Arkos 2 is a voxel-based indie FPS game featured in the June 2023 Steam Next Fest event, inspired by classic 90s titles such as Catacomb 3-D, Heretic, and Hexen. The first game in the series also has a demo available, so I checked out both to get an idea for what's new in the second installment.
Both games appear to feature similar aesthetics, enemy mechanics, and weapons. Roughly speaking, comparing Arkos 2 to Arkos 1 is a bit like comparing Quake to Doom. Arkos 2 features fully 3D enemies, pickups, and destructible barriers, whereas these features were flat in the first game. Heck, even destruction animations themselves have been upgraded to be more fully 3D. The second game also gets more creative with verticality, including stairs, elevators, destructible floors/ceilings, and even ceiling switches to keep your eyes open for.
Arkos 2 also improves upon the first game's weapons. In Arkos 1, not all weapons had alt-fire abilities, and alt-fire also doubled as a "use" key. Arkos 2 does away with a dedicated "use" key (once again more akin to Quake rather than Doom) and gives every weapon an alt-fire. It also gives the 4th weapon an even more satisfying additional use case...
Both games have a few appreciable accessibility settings, like being able to disable screen shake and flashes. I do wish that Arkos 2 had a toggle for view bob, as it was made overwhelmingly more noticeable compared to the first game.
Arkos 2 also adds a few extra graphics toggles (and fortunately its bloom no longer affects the menu as opposed to the first game). I sadly had to turn down the graphics level because the top 2 options were running into contention with my GPU stream encoding... I can't imagine they should peg an RTX 3060 that hard, given the game's relatively simple geometry; I hope that's something that can be made more efficient before final release.
These seem like fairly simple games at heart, but they seem to be executed fairly well. If you're a fan of the Wolfenstein/Catacombs 3D era of FPSes, or if you're a sucker for voxel-based graphics, give these a try.
Other Videos By CnEY
Other Statistics
Arkos Statistics For CnEY
There are 118 views in 2 videos for Arkos. There's close to an hours worth of content for Arkos published on his channel, making up less than 0.04% of the total overall content on CnEY's YouTube channel.