ARC Raiders review: Third person social experiment

For all of the talk of extraction shooters being the subgenre du jour, there aren’t many big teams taking a crack at it. Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone was short-lived, while Warzone’s DMZ didn’t fare much better, with anyone keen on running a raid or two limited to a relatively small subset of games.

So, believe me when I say I’m as surprised as anyone else that ARC Raiders might be the fledgling genre’s new gold standard. Between a unique setting that allows for the best of PvE and PvP to develop in tandem, a huge variety of biomes at launch, and polish that’s relatively rare this early on, Embark might have struck gold.

The Escapist recaps

• Arc Raiders launched last week, with servers going live for reviewers at the same time as everyone else – hence why this was originally a review-in-progress.
• The game is an extraction shooter where players work to survive short runs called Raids, with AI robots and human players on the same map.
• Arc Raiders is the kind of game that may convince extraction shooter sceptics that the genre has potential.
• A strong community is developing around the game already, with players banding together to share top tips for taking out key enemies.

The same, but different

ARC Raiders, on its surface, doesn’t do a whole lot differently from games in the genre that have come before.

You play a Raider, and are tasked with navigating a map, securing loot and completing objectives, and getting out, but it’s full of subtle twists that make it stand apart from the crowd – even if these don’t actually impact the moment-to-moment gameplay.

For example, vendors back at your home base of Speranza have honest-to-goodness voice acting and animations, but they’re still essentially menu-based. Your extraction options are noisy, relatively slow cargo elevators, rather than helicopters.

The game does a great job early on of holding your hand just long enough for you to get your bearings before it takes the stabilizers off and lets other players kick you squarely in the crafting materials.

Even early on, I found myself going against type and deploying as soon as I’m back at Speranza – or wherever I ended up dying to robots or wily rivals. That’s in stark contrast to my time in Escape From Tarkov, or even Delta Force‘s extraction mode, where I find myself needing a nice cup of tea to calm my nerves.

Friend or foe?

That’s not to say that ARC Raiders isn’t intense, though. It’s just so rewarding that I find myself tantalized by the carrot on a stick and therefore don’t mind being hit with the stick now and again.

Take the game’s skill tree, for example. In my first dozen excursions to the surface, I probably made it back safely around half the time, and yet I earned enough XP to make my Raider a swifter crouch-walker, or able to carry more banal s*** I probably didn’t need.

Early objectives are easy, bite-sized tasks that feel manageable but almost always lead to stories you could tell around the campfire in your next Discord catch-up, like the time your pal didn’t make it out because you shut him out of the elevator under heavy fire and ran like the wind, or when you helped a squad of strangers destroy a huge mechanized foe only for one to turn on the squad and try to make off with the loot.

Much of this comes from ARC Raiders‘ inclusion of proximity chat and quickfire emotes that shout “don’t shoot” so you can parley with a potential aggressor, as well as audio design that is truly sublime. Footsteps, gunshots, and the sound of ARC machines whirring to life all come through with perfect clarity, as does the rival that guns you down when they promised to lower their weapon.

In one early raid, I abseiled to the rooftop of a tall building and was preparing to drop back down, only for the footsteps of another Raider to echo through the skylight until I heard them attempt to abseil, too, letting me lie in wait for an ambush.

It walks the same line between cunning and comedy that Helldivers 2 did when it launched last year, and might just lead to even funnier stories simply because of the skullduggery to be found.

Robots, Robots Everywhere

Much has been made of ARC Raiders’ inclusion of AI voices, and I must admit, I find it more than a little jarring. Not only do they sound inhuman, but the way the game sets out its stall to show humanity’s pluckiness against ‘The Machines’, it makes the whole thing feel… inauthentic.

Its inclusion is at odds with the game’s very raison d’etre, and while it’s also in Embark’s The Finals, that game can at least carry it off as a sort of symptom of its late-stage capitalism world. Here, it’s like a gross wink to the camera that just isn’t needed.

And yet, as I set off again out of Speranza’s safety, clutching my recently-upgraded rifle knowing that my life (and the scraps I used to improve it) depend on it, I can’t wait to see ARC Raiders grow in the years to come.

More than DMZ, Hazard Zone, and even Escape from Tarkov, it’s the extraction shooter I can’t wait to play every night with friends or solo.

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