Escape From Tarkov: How to Breach Doors

Escape From Tarkov is a hardcore multiplayer survival game that challenges you to scavenge for resources or hunt the scavengers themselves, depending on the role you choose to play. A raid typically lasts for 45 minutes and you have to extract from one of several specific points on the map if you want to make it out with your loot.

A specific mechanic that often leaves players a bit dumbfounded though is breaching doors. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s not immediately clear what the point in breaching is. That’s what we aim to answer in this guide.

Escape From Tarkov: How to Breach Doors

While there are myriad possible answers to why you might breach a door in Escape From Tarkov, there’s only really one answer to the question of how. When you approach a door, a small menu appears that provides you with a bunch of options. You’re going to hit breach.

If you play Escape From Tarkov a lot, you probably know that already though, and are coming to this guide to figure out exactly why breaching doesn’t work. Let us guess: you’ve kicked a bunch of doors at this point and several open with a bang while nothing happens when it comes to others. Well, the answer of why is easy: you’re kicking the door from the wrong side.

You can only breach doors that open away from you. Try breaching a door that opens towards you, and you’ll just hurt your foot – both in real life and in Escape From Tarkov. This makes sense as most ordinary human beings are entirely incapable of kicking a doorframe in as well as a door.

Why Would I Breach a Door?

Well, this is an interesting question with no easy answer. When Escape From Tarkov first launched, breaching was a bigger part of the game than it is now. For starters, the animation for opening doors used to be a lot slower, and breaching was faster. So if you were chasing an enemy or running away from one, breaching allowed you an option to close the gap faster.

There also used to be the option to breach and use a variety of different grenades immediately, which is no longer available in the game. This was, formerly, the fastest and most effective method of smoking or flashing a bunch of enemies that you know were camping in a room nearby. Not only is this method now gone, but opening a door is fast now, so you can manually perform this action if you want to.

Now, there is talk that some of these features could return in the future, but in the meantime, breaching finds itself in a bit of a tricky position. It’s kind of pointless at this moment in time, really, as simply opening a door is equally as fast and doesn’t cause a lot of noise like breaching does. Opening a door normally also doesn’t require you to be locked into an animation, which breaching does. This can leave you completely open to enemy fire.

Right now, breaching is pretty much relegated to looking cool. If you kick open a door and clear out the unsuspecting Scav hiding behind it, you’re going to feel a little bit like a god. But it really doesn’t have any gameplay advantages aside from that – at least right now.