The mark of a truly stellar multiplayer game is when you and your friends are having as much fun in your 50th hour as you were in your first, and that’s a test ARC Raiders passes with flying colors. This is without question the most hooked I’ve found myself on an extraction shooter (and I’ve played a lot of them), with clean and tense gunplay, an incredibly satisfying progression system, and a loot game that has me sweating over what to put in my backpack and what to leave behind. Even with a few bugs to gunk up the gears, just about every journey topside to scavenge from the wastes and battle devious robotic overlords has been a complete blast, especially when accompanied by friends. After years of promising but uneven attempts, ARC Raiders feels like the first to fully realize this genre’s potential, and has set a new standard for it in the process.
ARC Raiders follows the usual extraction shooter formula of dropping you into a hostile zone to take down NPC enemies and scramble for loot, all while looking over your shoulder for rival crews who would love nothing more than to crack you open like a meat pinata and take everything you’ve collected, and then getting back out before they can. It doesn’t do much to iterate or expand on those fundamentals, but it does absolutely nail them, and that’s harder to do than it might sound – for example, big budget attempts like Battlefield 2042’s Hazard Zone mostly fell flat and the alpha for Bungie’s Marathon landed with such a thud it was delayed indefinitely. Even some of my favorites, like Hunt: Showdown and Escape From Tarkov, have always felt like rough drafts of what these daring high-risk, high-reward multiplayer games could be, so it’s long overdue for us to get a highly competent and very polished version like ARC Raiders.
One of the main ways it succeeds is in its stressful gunplay, where weapons only have a few rounds in each magazine, take a good deal of time to reload, and the robot NPCs you’ll face are either much faster than you or can rain down missiles to take you out in a single blast. This means I’m usually feeling like a rodent sneaking around to scavenge food and supplies from the world before slinking back to base – but when a fight does break out, it’s charged with delightful anxiety thanks to the knowledge that you’re about to either lose everything you’ve fought for or grab some awesome gear off the corpses of those you’ve bested. That’s true against both AI-controlled opponents and human players, though it’s smartest to avoid all of them unless you know you’ve brought the gear and skills required to throw down. That’s because firing a shot has a good chance of drawing all robot enemies and loot-hungry raiders to your position, taking advantage of your vulnerability to do as much damage as possible.
That said, I’ve been genuinely shocked by how nice much of the community has been, as I’ve often run into helpful strangers who are more interested in working together than fighting me. Especially when playing solo, where other solo players are prioritized in your matches, I’ve found it downright commonplace to encounter friendly folks who don’t just shoot me on sight like they do in every other extraction shooter out there, which has been a really nice change of pace from the normally sweaty matches. Granted, I’ve also run into plenty of people who say they’re friendly, only to shoot me in the back of the head as soon as I turn around (and then top it off with a racial slur), but hey, it’s still better than that being the norm. It remains to be seen how long the positive tilt of this community will last, as I’ve watched too many other games get overrun by cheaters and toxicity in short order, but at least in these past two weeks it’s been kinda inspiring to see the better angels of the ARC Raiders community win the day.
I’m genuinely shocked by how nice much of the community has been.And if I do find myself interested in some good ol’ PvP, the non-solo queues tend to be a lot more aggressive, which gives a chance for these high stakes bouts to shine. Dodge-rolling to avoid incoming gunfire and ducking behind cover to heal up before returning fire on an enemy squad is some of the most fun I’ve had in an extraction shooter, especially when you’ve got an arsenal of interesting gadgets, grenades, and leveled up guns you’ve bled for over the course of numerous matches. For example, I did a number on my opponents with my Torrente light machine gun before losing it tragically after falling off a ladder (courtesy of a weird bug), and coming locked and loaded with a handful of Wolfpack grenades that send homing missiles everywhere to take down drones before they can become a threat made me feel like an unstoppable god on the battlefield. It might not have the mechanical crispness of something like Remnant 2 or Gears of War, but it’s leagues above what we’ve seen in a live-service extraction game, and scratches the same kind of itch but in a multiplayer game type where that’s extremely hard to pull off.
Of course, if you’re battling online foes, there are moments where you’ll come up short and lose it all to a rival player. That stings, but at least also allows your beloved weapon to live on in the hands of a worthy successor – plus it just wouldn’t be as fun without that level of risk. The beauty of ARC Raiders, and what makes it far more approachable than most other extraction shooters, is how effortless its easy-come, easy-go loot feels. One way it accomplishes this is by providing pretty substantial free loadouts to use when you’re down on your luck, which are just powerful enough to get you back on your feet after a successful run or two. Plus, it gives you lots of ways to regain better equipment, like crafting and upgrading your own using spare parts you’ve collected, or by just buying some hardware from a vendor using cold hard cash. Even when you’re getting shipped home to your base in pieces, it’s hard to feel like you’ve been set back for very long, since a single good run can reverse your fortunes, and that’s definitely worth the occasional gut punch when you get taken for all you’re worth by some basement-dwelling troll who screeches into their mic after getting the jump on you.
There are still some instances where losing your hard-fought loot just sucks, though, like how you’ll occasionally get matched against an organized crew of three while playing solo. There were also times where I fell victim to unfortunate bugs that resulted in me losing some of my most cherished items. Once my character became stuck in the environment until enemies picked me off, and even after being revived by teammates I was unable to dislodge myself. That time where I fell off a ladder was because I phased through the environment while climbing it, falling to my death and causing me to lose my most prized possession up to that point. These occurrences were extremely rare, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I found myself pissed off at the injustice of it all across the 50 hours I’ve played – but when the stakes are as high as they are, even a tiny amount of this kind of stuff can be downright infuriating. Thankfully, specific bugs aside, one really impressive part of ARC Raiders is just how well it runs overall. In addition to being the prettiest extraction shooter to-date, it also maintained a rock-solid 60 FPS when I played on Xbox Series X, and pushed well beyond that on my high-end PC.
The main reason its hyper-competitive dynamic manages to never sting for long is its incredibly well-designed progression system, which brilliantly makes every match an opportunity for forward momentum, even when you’ve just lost all your best loot. ARC Raiders accomplishes this by giving you a whole bunch of treadmills to run on at the same time, whether it’s the quest system that unlocks bits of story and introduces you to various mechanics by giving you a checklist of stunts to pull off, character XP you gain just by playing matches that grants skill points to dump into skill trees, crafting stations that can be upgraded with the right materials brought back from expeditions, weekly trials that grant all sorts of powerful rewards upon completion, and the Expedition Project that lets you prestige and reset your character in exchange for vanity rewards. There’s so many different ways to make satisfying progress that even being robbed of my favorite weapon wasn’t the end of the world, which goes a long way toward making ARC Raiders more approachable than its peers, in which the rich tend to get richer and the poor almost always get poorer.
Its incredibly well-designed progression makes every match an opportunity for forward momentum.That said, not all the pieces of the progression puzzle are created equal. While completing quests and taking part in weekly trials does an awesome job of giving you specific tasks during matches with worthy rewards to match, the skill tree is less exciting, as it's weirdly littered with a bunch of filler perks that do little to power you up. Many of them offer unexciting bonuses like making your stamina return slightly faster while crouching – a node I fully leveled up and could still barely tell the difference it made. Meanwhile, others are pretty significant game changers, like one perk that let me craft consumable items while out in the field. The pacing between these two tiers of skills isn’t very well tuned unfortunately, and it felt like I was waiting to buy an ability I was actually excited about every 10 levels or so, which takes quite a bit of grinding to get through.
The story told through those quests doesn’t impress either, not that it’s really what you are here for in the first place. The worldbuilding actually has a lot of promise, as I’m still genuinely curious about the post-apocalyptic surface world that’s been ravaged by environmental disasters and the mysterious origin and motives of the robots that now control it. But there’s almost nothing to flesh it out beyond a few dialogue snippets while chatting with vendors and some small drips of lore about the mechanical minions you’re fighting. I hope they'll dig into that stuff more in the future, because it’s a neat foundation in theory, but it's pretty clear developer Embark Studios didn't care much about the story at all – that’s perhaps best exemplified by the fact that many of the voices are done by AI, which is extremely apparent in their flat and unremarkable deliveries and makes listening to vendors talk about whatever mission they're sending you on basically a waste of time.
One place that worldbuilding does get to shine through a little bit is across the four maps that are currently available, all of which are very cool and have distinct vibes to them – from the ruined husk of a waterlogged dam to a city buried in red sand. It’s a good thing that they’re so great to look at, too, because you’ll spend a whole lot of time trekking back and forth through them in search of loot. With only a handful of areas to explore, it wasn’t terribly long before I felt like I’d seen the vast majority of the zones, but there’s also tons of hidden nooks and crannies and secret areas that can only be accessed with the proper know-how or a rare keycard drop, which did a great job at keeping me interested in retracing my steps through each area.
Another thing that makes exploring each zone really rewarding is learning how to best the various NPC opponents you find along the way. What start out as tiny drones that can be fairly easily brought down quickly turn into swarms of dangerous hovering robots and their more intimidating siblings that can only be destroyed with the aid of some serious firepower. Some of the interactions between these robotic foes are pretty impressive, like how hovering little surveillance cameras called Snitches will mark you for execution for all their friends, who then fly in to attack you or, worse yet, rain in ballistic missiles from a distance that turn the area around you into a blast zone. The way the enemy is able to work together to overwhelm you with superior numbers and instantaneous coordination makes getting caught out in the open an incredibly scary situation that I lost many a loot haul to. There’s also a nice mix of your basic roly poly enemies that shoot fire or explode (but die when they’re so much as sneezed at) and massive, scary robots like the marauding Queen enemy that can only be dealt with by a fully-loaded group of raiders.
That said, these automatons aren’t the most critical of thinkers and often lose track of you the second you duck behind a tree or turn a corner. They also seem to have trouble navigating some of the environments, and you can sometimes see them look like they’re confused, wandering off or getting stuck on the corner of a building before giving up the chase. Another nitpick I have with fighting the NPC enemies is just how long it takes before you stand a chance against any of them aside from the weakest drones. I probably played for over 20 hours before I felt properly geared to take down one of the spiderlike Leapers or deadly Rocketeers, instead spending much of that time hiding like a rat in the shadows and largely avoiding drawing any attention. I would have liked for a faster climb towards being able to confront some of these baddies, because for a stretch there it felt like I’d never be able to, and tip-toeing around for tens of hours can get old after a while.
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