I am an EFT Veteran. I’ve played Tarkov since august 2017 for thousands of hours, multiple Kappas, both of PVP and PVE mode. Here is my honest review about ABI which I play since august 2024. Pros and C o n s are not in order of importance.

Pros :
- A LOT of QOL (Custom loadout, fast gearing to return in raid which reduce the waiting time between raids).
- Fast pace gaming without the overwhelming presence of weight inertia.
- Very optimised game, you need a very low-end PC to run it. I NEVER had any crash in thousands of hours.
- Easy to understand/hard to master game. As long as you understand the basic of ammo and armor level, you are good to go but it’ll be hard to be a solo forbidden TV Station master.
- Beautiful skins (C O N S of this is the very, very high prices of them).
- No silly COD skins (For now, let’s hope it stays like that).
- There is a LOT (sometime too much xD) of events/quests/battlepass goal to do to win free Koen and free s k i n s Some free s k i n s are very nice.
- Ranking is fun to do and gives you another goal to play long-term.
- In general, PVP feels better than Tarkov’s PVP.

C o n s :
- RED AMMO. There are tier 6/7 red ammo (snipers ammo) that can 1 tap you and you won’t even know from where it came from. Also, using red ammo is low risk high reward gameplay on the highest ‘difficulty’ forbidden mode. The problem with that is you can get 1 tap by a dude wearing a 350k kit while your kit worth millions. This problem could be solved by raising the minimum gear value of forbidden mode to 750k-1M. This problem could also be solved by just removing or rebalancing red ammo penetration and flesh damage power. This problem is very serious for the long-term longevity of the game.
- Very high price of items in the shop. It’s a free game so I understand that shop items are expensive (I bought multiples hundred $ on the shop so I’m not hating) but those prices are not for everyone. A knife can cost 60-80 USD.
- ‘SOLVED’ : PTW. Before Steam launch, we could buy Koen (in game currency) for real life money, which was PTW. You can’t buy Koen anymore with real life money which is perfect BUT since the game never wipe, people who bought several millions of Koen before Steam launch had a jump start on new players. This ‘problem’ will resolve by itself with time since we can’t buy Koen anymore.
- DBNO (Down But Not Out) status. If you are playing solo (which I do 95% of the time), if you fight against a squad and you zero the chest or HP of an enemy, the enemy won’t die. He will drop and CAN be revived by his teammate which make the 1v2/3/4 fight extremely difficult for new or inexperienced players. They should remove the DBNO status.

TLDR ; I would give ABI a solid 8.5/10. If they remove red ammo, DBNO status, expand the game (more guns/maps) and stay far from silly COD skins, it can go to 9 or 9.5/10. I highly recommend this game to everybody, it’s super fun 😊

EDIT 1 : February 1st, 2026 : Like I told in the TLDR, they seems to want to go throught ugly and ridiculous COD skins, which is, IMO, incredibly stupid. This game is still very good, but the new emo/anime skins are HORRIBLE. I drop down the game from 8.5/10 to 8/10. I want milsim skins, not stupid emo skins.