Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter that wants you to pay attention. It wants you to scan the horizon and really listen to its soundscape, and that makes it one of the most exciting multiplayer games heading to PS5 this year.
We've had our eyes on Arc Raiders since its announcement back in 2021. However, once developer Embark Studios released The Finals, a breath of fresh air in the first-person shooter space, our anticipation grew.
You can check out this preview, along with some Arc Raiders gameplay, over on our YouTube channel.
Well, we've finally wracked up over seven hours with the game on PC, familiarising ourselves with its gameplay loop, its progression systems, and the overall feel of its experience. We walked away feeling like we barely scratched the surface, but also loving every second we spent with it.
Arc Raiders is a big old extraction shooter, with multiple huge maps, vendors dishing out quests, multiple Helldivers 2-esque battle passes, a grindy skill tree, and a whole crafting system that needs upgrading. We’ll get into all of that, but let’s start out with Arc’s base premise.
Arc Raiders is set in a post-apocalypse, where humans have been forced underground by the Arc machines. Raiders (the players) head up to the surface of the Rust Belt, to scavenge supplies for the underground city of Speranza. Get to the surface, fill your bag with loot, and get out, all whilst confronting or avoiding AI Arc machines and real players.
If you’re familiar with the extraction genre, you’ll have heard it all before. It’s a formula we’ve seen in Hunt: Showdown, Escape From Tarkov, and even Helldivers 2 — minus the PvP aspects. However, Arc Raiders stands apart from the crowd by delivering a top tier audio and visual experience.
Rocking a cassette-futurism aesthetic, Embark has cooked up a truly great looking shooter, with overexposed lighting, brutalist architecture, and cobbled together sci-fi cosmetics and weapons that are very reminiscent of Star Wars: A New Hope. There’s a certain realism to it all that just completely sold us on its setting, with each hallway, alley, or rooftop feeling alive in some kind of intangible way.
There’s an authentic feel to its maps, and we quite often thought back to the first time we explored the wall in the Cosmodrone in Destiny. It’s huge and aged, and you can feel that history through its very walls.
A lot of that is down to the sound design too, which is impeccable. It actually sounds bad in some kind of imperfect yet deliberate way, with echoing and distortion. It avoids that perfect Hollywood action soundscape you’d find in a Call of Duty, tying tremendously into the aesthetic and easily making it one of the most immersive extraction shooters we’ve played.
Every interaction, movement, surface and enemy has a distinct sound to it. We spent a lot of time simply listening to make ourselves aware of the nearby dangers, whether those were the ominous hums of a nearby Arc drone, or the shuffling footsteps of another team of Raiders.
It brings the stealthier aspects of the genre to its forefront, where some of our favourite moments with the game involve our team quietly sneaking around, navigating our way towards unsuspecting rivals based on their sound alone. It’s very Hunt: Showdown in that respect.
It’s the type of game that puts everything you need to know about it in the world rather than in HUD or menus. We’re sure that if you spent enough time with the game, you’d be able to distinguish which Arc machine is nearby based on its various bleeps and bloops.
Gunfire, flares from downed enemies, extractions being broadcast via speakers and flashing lights. Not everything is so clearly signposted, but it’s there if you know what to pay attention to, and that for us is the marking of a well designed game.
It’s putting the onus on the player to learn the ways of its world. Even after just a few hours, our team was being far more conscious of the sound we were making, and considering our paths a lot more tactically. Same goes for the content within its maps, like locked doors and Arc-protected loot, which is slowly revealed as you become more familiar.
It's leaning on the more hardcore experience in that way, where resources are limited, and you can’t just shoot your way through every situation. We had games where being spotted by a single Arc machine spiralled into one disaster after the other, surviving by the skin of our teeth, and breathing a sigh of relief when we found ten measly SMG bullets or a single shield recharger. You can even try to team up with other bands of Raiders.
The third-person gameplay feels responsive and snappy, albeit entirely dictated by your stamina meter and weight capacity in those early hours. Each weapon has a distinct feel, especially through the DualSense controller, which we used for the duration of our preview sessions. The game is optimised quite well for gamepads, although it’s obvious that loot management is better suited to mouse and keyboard.
With limited supplies, there’s a keen emphasis on taking cover and making sure your shots count. Skirmishes could often feel like a dance, as you dive for more cover and try to get the advantage. We also love a slick video game slide, and Arc Raiders has good one. Great stuff.
And if it’s not obvious by now, it’s also really easy to fail. Whether it's Arc machines or other players, we lost more games than ones where we successfully extracted. It’s the carrot and stick of the extraction genre, and we’re sure if you’re interested in Arc Raiders, you’ll already know whether that brutal gameplay loop is for you or not.
Extracting in Arc Raiders is obviously quite important. Successfully extracting not only fills your vault with loot for future runs, it also garners XP and the in-game currency. Levelling up with XP gives you skill points to put into the Mobility, Conditioning, and Survival skill trees — which upgrade stamina, mounting speeds, loot reveal speeds, and so on.
Currency can be used to purchase gear from the various vendors. You can also sell your loot to these vendors to make up currency, and complete quests to gain more XP and currency. However, resources are incredibly expensive amongst vendors, and that’s where crafting comes in.
Hoarding back various supplies is paramount to the crafting system in the game. Starting out with a basic crafting bench, you need supplies to create specific crafting benches and then upgrade them. This will allow you to craft higher tier items such as ammo, healing supplies, and weapon attachments.
So much of this is dependent on you actually being able to successfully extract, which like we said, isn’t always possible. However, Arc Raiders includes features to stop players hitting a brick wall.
For starters, you will still earn XP on failed extractions, just far less than you would if you made it out. When back in Speranza, you’ll receive a regular collection of basic supplies from your crafting bench rooster (yes, rooster), so you should still be able to craft some things.
And then if you have no weapons, you can also head out on a run with a freebie loadout, which is randomised with the various low-tier weapons and gear in the game. Surviving with one of these can be tough, though, and that’s when the stealth comes back into play. There are also safe pockets, which mean even if you die you’ll still extract with items in them.
Having praised all of this, something we're really disappointed with in Arc Raiders is the cosmetic customisation. This may be purely down to our hundreds of hours in The Finals — but that game has some of the best cosmetic customisation in the multiplayer space. Every skin you unlock via the battle pass in The Finals is divided by tops, trousers, hats, glasses, gloves, and shoes, and can then be mixed and matched with other items you’ve unlocked.
Here in Arc Raiders, the battle passes, which can be purchased via currency you earn in-game, feature full outfits. Each has something to tweak like whether you wear the headpiece or not, but the only other cosmetic you can mix it with are the backpacks. Don’t get us wrong, the cosmetics are really well designed, but it feels like a step back compared to Embark’s previous release.
Arc Raiders is a game we can’t wait to play more of. We’d love to spend more time with its progression systems to see if they’re really worth investing in, but it’s nice to know it has a reason to grind outside of loot alone. Still, what really impressed us is the game’s out-in-the-field experience.
This is a cinematic and immersive game. Gunfights are frantic and tactical, stealth is engrossing, and the audio and visual experience is best in class. There’s an emergent sense to its games that made each one its own story, which is at the core of a great multiplayer experience. We just need to know how it’ll run on PS5 — but we think Embark is onto another winner here.
Is Arc Raiders on your radar? Grab a team and at least try to extract from the comments section below.
