Embark Studios is made-up of former DICE developers, and it shows. First, THE FINALS offered us a game show style first-person shooter with destruction that Battlefield lacked, up until the recently released Battlefield 6. Now we have ARC Raiders, a game that started as a PvE-only game, now a PvPvE extraction shooter that should have you every bit excited as the hype around it leading up to launch has been. Extraction shooters is an emerging sub-genre of shooter that have seen their fair share of Escape from Tarkov clones and many unique attempts that just could not find an audience for one reason or another. Embark chose to carve a new path by making a third-person extraction shooter that bears similarity in structure to Tarkov, but decidedly goes in the opposite direction of nearly every design decision to be something memorable and truly outstanding. If you were looking for THE extraction shooter to try and hope to stick with, ARC Raiders is it.
The story of what’s happened to the world is sparse, but essentially: Man creates ARC, ARC destroys Man, ARC inherits the earth. Except not all humans were killed, and what’s left are rising up to put an end to them once and for all. Except, the machines as ARC are incredibly powerful and oppressive. It’s up to you and friends to go top-side, away from the haven known as Speranza and scavenge for every weapon, item, and tool to become strong enough to fight back. Throughout the course of your time playing the game, new bits of lore and smaller tales are told that fill in gaps. There’s nothing precise about the storytelling, but what’s here is intriguing enough to have you ponder about the “world that was”.
This is an extraction looter shooter. Whether solo or in a trio, you’ll work to pick-up everything not nailed down, so long as it’s valuable to you. You can only carry so many items where your backpack gets filled, or you get over-encumbered by the weight of what you’ve acquired. These excursions you embark on, are known as raids. Raids have timers of up to thirty minutes, though sometimes you can spawn in late, where around ten minutes of that raid has already gone by. In order to keep everything that you not only brought in with you, but the items you’ve picked up along the way, you must extract. There’s a map that shows every location, to include extraction points and timers. Some extractions will close after a certain amount of time, so you’ll have to plan your route carefully to ensure that you are able to make it to your destination not only safely, but with a enough time. If you die or don’t extract, you lose everything you brought and collected. Some solace to this is that you have a safe pocket to store one item that will come back to Speranza upon death. To get out, you must hit a button on a panel that’ll either open an elevator, stop a fan, or call a train to bring you back to Speranza. In this time, other players might discover you or ARC will swarm your location. The biggest quality of life this game offers as an extraction shooter, is that when you are depleted of all your shields and health, you go into a downed-but-not-out state. This starts a timer of bleeding out, but you are able to crawl around, call the extraction, and even get out before you bleed out. This is often a harrowing and death-defying stunt that I’ve done dozens of times now, and every extraction feel like a triumph, and a story to share with friends.
Before loading into a raid, you’ll have the opportunity to equip your raider with gear you customize, such as the weapons, ammo, shields, and quick use items they’ll have available to them during the raid. Alternatively, if you’re scared of losing some of your best items, or are not comfortable with a particular map, you can use a “Free Loadout” that’s a randomized set of items you don’t know what you’ll have until you spawn on the map. If you survive the raid with this kit, you can take everything you have with you, and even convert that free loadout augment into something more valuable at the trader at headquarters. Gear fear is a term used to describe people who are afraid of bringing items they’ve acquired or been given and ultimately losing them. It’s a natural thing to feel when you can lose everything upon death, but ARC Raiders eases this with the “Free Loadout” option that you can use every raid, and without a cooldown. At some point this fear dissipates. However, the free loadout will have diminishing returns as time goes on, because players will have better gear that they’ve either found, crafted, or upgraded that a free kit can’t compete against.
There are currently four maps in the game: Dam Battlegrounds, Spaceport, Buried City, and Blue Gate. Each map is unique looking and feeling, where only certain items to be found on each of them, as well as quests that can only be done there. With there being so few maps, they give you the opportunity to learn their ins and outs, and find your favorite. Each map is special in its own regard, with underground labyrinths, towering structures to explore, and mysteries to uncover. Maps also can be played with modifiers, with night variants and special weather events like electromagnetic storms that has lightning striking anything it finds with alarming frequency. Replaying this maps has not gotten old, and I’m still discovering new things or visiting new areas after 35 hours.
In Speranza, you’ll have a space all to yourself and be able to build out your workshop that houses all sorts of benches that can allow you to craft weapons, ammo, health items, shield items, and even materials. The gunsmith bench allows you to upgrade guns, making them more powerful, removing rust to make them more reliable, and you deadlier. You can even break down items by recycling them into other items that can be used for something else. Every bench can be leveled up three times, and so long as you have the materials and blueprints, can craft some of the best items in the game. You have a rooster named Scrappy who can be somewhat customized, and this little guy will collect items for you while you’re in a raid, giving you new materials all the time. My only desire is that I wish you could navigate this space, as well as Speranza rather than just looking at it in a menu.
Augments are the backbone to your loadout, allowing you to focus on combat or looting, giving you the opportunity for stronger shields, or sacrificing that for more carrying capacity. Blueprints can only be acquired in-raid, but these spawn at the whim of RNG, as I’ve not even collected half of the 68 that you can learn. Some blueprints are more special than others, and having the ability to craft some of these more powerful items can definitely give you an edge when going into your next raid.
As you earn experience from exploring a map, engaging in combat, and even successfully extracting, you’ll level up. Each new level acquired will net you a skill point that can be spent on the skill tree. It has three major branches: conditioning, mobility, and survival. You can specialize in a certain branch or spread your points evenly. At this moment, it’s still unclear if you can level up to a point to be able to spend points on every skill and upgrade, or if you’ll have to be judicious in your planning. However, the final items in each branch offer substantial boons, such as being able to recover health while health is critical or being able to open up some of the game’s most difficult secure containers. For players looking for a reset after doing all that they came to do, they can embark on an Expedition (which is equivalent to prestiging in Call of Duty). After collecting all the requisite items, you’ll reset that character with bonuses afterwards.
While it is possible to play ARC Raiders without engaging in combat, fighting the machines or other players is the largest aspect to the game. Weapons don’t really stray from things like rifles, shotguns, pistols, LMGs, and snipers. However, the way in which they handle, fire, or even reload are unique. For instance, the Anvil is a revolver style pistol that can be upgraded into a two-shot menace. Meanwhile the Rattler is better served an airsoft equivalent than anything offering lethality to other players or even the ARC.
Now, the ARC serve as the game’s PvE component, and all have weaknesses you can exploit, simply by learning their behaviors. It’s best to take them on in one-on-one fights, as they are challenging and even deadlier in numbers. There’s ticks that are small, and will climb on you and nibble and peck your health away. Fireballs are rolling balls of fiery death if you aren’t paying attention. Then you encounter wasps where shooting their rotors is an easy win, but their armored brother the hornet has two of their rotors protected. The Queen is the largest ARC in the game currently, and either requires a full team of properly geared players, or unprecedented coordination of the entire raid to defeat. All of the ARC in-between can be fought with the right amount of skill and weaponry. While I initially thought the robots were not worthy adversaries, I have been humbled and impressed by their prowess and AI tactics.
Other players are the game’s PvP, you can load into the game solo or with two people either by partying up or filling in. Then there’s the wholesome aspect of the game whereby running into other players, you can pull up the emote wheel and exclaim “Don’t shoot!” in hopes that they won’t open fire on you. This happened in the Tech Tests and Playtests, players just banded together to fight the ARC or complete quests together instead of against one another. From a lore perspective, it makes more sense for humans to work together than anything else, and this is something that has persisted in the two weeks since launch. Now, not everyone is as nice or forgiving, many players have a taste for blood or a penchant for betrayal. As time goes on as players become stronger and more powerful, it remains to be seen how long this armistice will last.
Quests in ARC Raiders serve as a means to acquire items, advance stories, and further character development among the NPC traders you interact with. Unlike every game of its and none of its kind, completion does not earn you experience points. You’ll get money or valuable items that might aid you in other quests or projects, but you surpsingly won’t earn any experience for completing them. That’s not to say they aren’t worth doing, but the incentive feels minimal, though it does give you goals for the moment-to-moment gameplay. The beginner quests will just have you visiting locations that help you get acquainted with the map, acquiring items you need, or just getting you comfortable with fighting the ARC. Quests become more elaborate, asking more of you, and requiring you to take action through multiple steps before it is complete. In other games, if you don’t survive the raid, the quest can’t be completed. In ARC Raiders, so long as you’ve completed all the steps within the raid, it will count in order to be completed back at base – this is a good thing.
Aside from quests, there are Feats which are a rotating set of challenges to complete for in-game currency, with bonuses for completing multiple within the daily reset. There’s a battle pass of sorts, called Decks that by delivering a field crate to a field station, or destroying a certain number of ARC, or dealing damage to other players not on your team can earn it. They can be rather simple, or might ask you to play in a way you might normally do. Right now, the Deck on-offer is free for every player, requiring no buy-in besides the game itself, and is up to you how you progress in it. Anyone who’s played Helldivers 2 will find similarities and familiarity here. It’ll be interesting how these expand and grow over time, but right now it offers just enough cosmetic unlocks and even some premium currency to complete the feats presented to you.
This is simply one of the best, if not the best optimized Unreal Engine 5 games available today. And it doesn’t even run on this most performant version of the engine, utilizing Unreal Engine 5.3.2, this is a blueprint for what other developers should follow. While I do utilize DLSS, I do have it set to DLAA (Native) and Frame Generation, I’m able to achieve over 100fps with ease, and that’s with having every setting set to the maximum. It’s a stunning game that’s incredibly well-optimized, a rarity today, but appreciated nonetheless.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (8 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
ARC Raiders is an exhilarating, tense, and streamlined extraction shooter with tremendous accessibility. Embark Studios have captured lightning in a bottle with this, and it’s truly remarkable how good it is in every way. This is not “just another Tarkov clone”, it’s unlike anything else you’ve played before, and that’s why it’ll be successful. ARC Raiders is not a gateway drug to other extraction shooters, it is the drug.
A Steam code was provided by the publisher for review purposes
