ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter that can be played solo or with one or two friends. The draw appears to be a hefty mix of PvE and PvP elements, but does Embark pull it off? Can a million people be wrong?
Arc Raiders
Developer: Embark Studios
Price: $39.99
Platform: PC (reviewed), PlayStation 5, & Xbox Series X|S
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
“A couple of fellas in the next room.” I’m speaking quietly, even though we’re casually chatting over Discord, the enemy can’t hear this part. “They’ll come through this hallway.” My friends Clancy and Patrick have joined me on this excursion topside. We had a nasty run-in with some ARCs last round, so we’re looking to blow off a little steam.
The three of us set up in the adjacent hallway, knowing they’d be making their way towards us. We sit quietly, watching the door as we can hear the raiders in the next room cleaning the place out. I can listen to them running around, their boots slapping against the metal floor, using their halligan bars to pry open rusted-over containers.
They’re getting closer.
Despite listening closely, I don’t hear the door open, so when I see a man walk in and look at the three of us crouched in the hallway, I’m taken off guard and pause. Patrick opens fire first, and that brings me back in. We lay into him, and he goes down. His friends rush in, but they’re caught completely by surprise.
A flare shoots out of each of them as they go down, alerting others in the area that a fight has gone down. We go in and loot our spoils. Aside from a few rare ingredients, these guys had nothing. They had no chance of beating us, even if they were the ones who had gotten the jump. Welcome to ARC Raiders.
Spending time within the world of ARC Raiders, I was initially put off for a few reasons. Expectations can lead to disappointment, and this one was on me. I was expecting to be able to walk around the underground city that houses all the folks looking to go topside. Instead, the entire city is menu-based, focusing solely on your raider, their workshop, and the traders.
The underground city is known as Speranza, where you can apply skill points or customize your raider, craft materials and usable items, trade for materials and guns, and choose the location you’d like to go topside. The locations are gated behind a number of excursions topside before you can advance to the next one. This is a fairly linear process and took a few hours.
Topside is where the real game takes place. Speranza has quests to follow, but they do little more than pepper the plight of the remaining survivors. What happened topside? Some of that is explained if you complete enough quests, but the PvE (Player vs. Environment) of ARC Raiders isn’t really the showstopper it’s made out to be. Most of the quests are merely fetch quests, or essentially tutorials on some out-of-the-box thinking.
The story above, and many others I have about ARC Raiders, highlight some of the pitfalls of this game style. Primarily, despite being pitched as a PvPvE game, ARC Raiders is a PvP (Player vs. Player) game. No matter what you do topside, if someone else wants to engage you in PvP, there’s nothing you can do to stop them.
Topside is a warzone. As you enter, there’s a timer in the center-top of your screen letting you know how much time you have until an ARC Orbiter comes and messes the whole place up. So you gotta get in, get moving, and get out. Extraction locations are spread throughout the map, but are also on timers, eventually becoming disabled as the timer progresses.
Likewise, more ARC enemies enter the longer a map continues. The design of the ARC enemies is brilliant. Annoying, but brilliant. Most of the ARC enemies you’ll encounter are flying enemies with multiple parts to aim at. As you pick off propellers, sections of the enemy ARCs, they’ll struggle to stay afloat, aim, and even completely discharge their weapons in wild directions as they try to maintain altitude.
ARC enemies don’t merely fly around the map though; there are spider-like ticks that hide in dark warehouses and office buildings, making chirps as you walk nearby. Fireballs as well, orbs that roll on the ground and either explode or shoot fire at you when they get close. Topside is loaded with ARC enemies looking to ruin your experience.
The more difficult ARC enemies like the rocketeer, the bombadier, the leaper, or even the queen are enemies to avoid unless you’re ready for the fights. These are enemies that should be fought only by more experienced raiders, and really, raiders you can trust. And truthfully, you shouldn’t trust anyone.
Fighting the ARC enemies serves more as an annoyance and a way to get players to find other players for fights. At least the weaker ARC enemies. The sound design in ARC Raiders is very good, likely because survival is so important. The ARCs themselves range in how much sound they generate, but the sound of leather on metal is apparent to anyone sharing the same space.
What makes the PvP aspect frustrating is not the actual gameplay itself. In fact, once I started indiscriminately killing other players, I started getting decent loot and having a lot of fun with the game. No, the PvP aspect is frustrating BECAUSE of the PvE component. Part of that is by design, and part is a result of design.
One big issue I ran into while playing ARC Raiders is that players who head topside might find themselves on a server that’s been loaded for a while. When embarking to the topside and kicking off a new play session, the server will give you 30 minutes topside to do what you need to do. However, players can spawn into existing servers, giving them significantly less time to do what they intended to do.
You’ll grab a loadout, look to do a quest, get spawned across the map from the quest location, and only have 17 minutes to complete it. Travel can take time in ARC Raiders because you’re not simply navigating from point A to B. Even if you discount the fact that stamina drains quickly and regenerates slowly, there are plenty of hazards in between two points in a map.
ARCs patrolling the entire zone, enemy raiders looking to pick you off, environmental struggles, and let’s not forget that pesky loot that’s desiring to go home with you. This causes another issue, because the resource tracking in ARC Raiders is not good.
Each workshop, including Scrappy the plucky rooster that brings you basic materials while you’re out topside, somehow, can be upgraded. Upgrading workstations allows you to craft better items, as expected. If you don’t have all the materials to upgrade, you can track the resources needed. What the heck does that do?
First, it puts an entry in your logbook. Then it adds a small line at the bottom of the item description: “Tracked for blueprint.” That’s it. You can’t store the items in the upgrade menu, you don’t get a little special outline on items that are being tracked, you just get the logbook entry, and that lil’ warning.
This speaks to a bigger issue for ARC Raiders: space. Your stash is puny, and items can only be stacked so high. The cost of expanding your stash is high and, worst of all, once you max it out, money is practically useless. The UX, especially when it comes to tracking resources, could use a lot of work.
Surely, there must be SOMETHING good about this game, right? Absolutely. The Player vs. Player moments are incredible, giving some dizzying highs I haven’t experienced in quite a while. And when you’re playing with your friends and you’re in the zone, for lack of a better term, it feels incredible. Likewise, the player interactions I’ve experienced while playing solo have been some of the best I’ve ever had.
I’ve helped people complete quests and find resources; heck, just giving directions can be a fun experience in a game like ARC Raiders. The chips are down, you’re in a completely open PvP area, and there are absolutely NO repercussions for killing another player. And yet, solo play is downright friendly.
You can’t queue solos, though, when you enter matchmaking, it appears we’re all in the same class. Embark has commented on Discord that their focus on matchmaking has been on maintaining a split between solos and squads. Whenever I’ve gone in duos or trios, I’ve seen more duos and trios than solos. However, this is purely anecdotal, and I’d love Embark to give us a little more information on how matchmaking works.
From a strictly performance perspective, this might be the best-optimized game I’ve ever played. I’m running an aging PC with a GeForce 2080 SUPER, and I don’t experience frame drops or performance issues; the game runs flawlessly on my ultrawide monitor. Hats off to Embark for how well this dang game runs. I am impressed.
Furthermore, the game is gorgeous. I’m not running at the highest settings, but at-a-glance, it’s just a beautiful sight to behold. Foliage is lush, buildings are rusty and old, and crumbled walls look realistic. Much of my enjoyment of ARC Raiders stems from how well it plays.
That’s not even speaking to the gunplay, which is extremely fun. Players will naturally run into hiccups here and there. As a third-person shooter, aiming around objects can cause the reticle to bounce a bit. Otherwise, the gunplay is extremely fun, especially when shooting ARCs. Not to discount the feedback when taking out a raider’s shield or knocking them down.
The use of AI in ARC Raiders is kind of a joke. As they did in The Finals, Embark Studios paid actors to create a sound bank of their voices for the sole purpose of using AI to create new voice lines. These aren’t important characters or recognizable voices; they’re merely the voices of the raiders shouting that an item is nearby.
The AI use case here is superfluous at best and reads more like an invented reason to use the technology than a solid use case. Which is the type of thing you’d do with a dying and pointless piece of tech you want everyone to use. Especially if you’re the Nexon CEO, owner of Embark Studios.
If you’re able to set that aside, ARC Raiders can and will give you a lot of fun moments. The player interactions have been on par with many MMORPGs I’ve played in both depth and stakes. The gunfights I’ve gotten into have ranged from exhausting to nail-biting. And it really is thrilling finding epic gear just milling around topside.
Another issue is the high price of cosmetics, with many outfits priced as if the game were free-to-play, despite the $40 buy-in. Cosmetic packs costing upwards of $20 for a game that’s already been purchased for $40 seem very high.
The bigger question is, will it last? ARC Raiders has legs, for sure, and their roadmap for the rest of the year seems downright ambitious. If they can maintain a steady content stream and keep things fresh, ARC Raiders might become a contender. But even during the review period I set for myself, I can tell this game is on a timer for me, and I’m getting close to the end.
The Final Word
ARC Raiders has some dizzying highs, but much of your experience is based entirely on luck. Gunplay, optimization, and social interactions can only take ARC Raiders so far. With issues like poor UX, high cost of cosmetics, use of AI, and some strange design decisions, it’s hard to recommend ARC Raiders.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
