ARC Raiders takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth, where superintelligent machines of unknown origin rule the surface and humans are forced underground. You play as a raider, an elite soldier with a bad haircut and a playdough face who dares to brave the surface, armed with kitbashed weapons, to scavenge for the supplies that keep the underground city of Speranza ticking.
Despite taking place around Italy, ARC Raiders might as well be on another planet entirely. It's an alien ecosystem you have to learn to survive. Die and you lose everything you've scavenged, unless you've stashed something in your safe pocket.
Every ARC has unique behavior. You learn which machines to fight and which machines to fear. You learn what to take from them and what to leave, and how those items you scavenge might help you survive the next encounter. Take the snitch, a disc-shaped drone that hovers overhead and scans for raiders with a searchlight before calling in reinforcements when it spots someone -- destroy one and take its core, and you can throw that core like a grenade to call in drones to fight a rival team of humans.
Because yes, this is an extraction shooter, and ARC aren't always the most deadly thing you'll face topside. Other players you encounter could be friendly, or they could want to avoid searching all the drawers, car hoods and electrical cabinets in favor of murdering you and looting your corpse instead.
Every meeting with another team of players is tense and paranoia-inducing. Some skirt by and avoid you entirely, others watch silently from a nearby hedge, some want to be pals, some shoot first and some will pretend to be friendly before shooting you in the back. At least the ARC are predictable in their cruelty.
What makes the game special is how all of these things come together with the rest of the game's thoughtful systems such as stamina management, inventory weight, climbing mechanics, level design and gadgets. The toolkit is deep and the sandbox is wide, so no two encounters ever play out the same across the four large maps the game launched with. Sure, it's frustrating when you lose everything, but there's usually a lesson to be learned from each failure, even if that lesson is that humans can't be trusted.
The murderbots are ARC Raiders' secret sauce. They're surprisingly difficult, and that's part of what makes the game so refreshing. A couple of standard drones can easily kill you with the one-two punch of a stun shot and a hail of machine gun fire, and the rocket-firing ships and other large ARC are brutes. Taking them down feels like a big achievement.
You have to appreciate how reactive these robot enemies are to your shots, too. ARC Raiders was originally built as a co-op game and you can see that lineage in how much attention has been given to making enemies satisfying to fight. Shoot a rotor off a drone and they spin wildly depending on physics and momentum, before finally stabilizing themselves to return fire. Shoot off another and they spin out before crashing into the ground, sometimes going down guns-blazing. Sometimes they crash into another ARC and take that down with them. The larger enemies lose plating, spark, fizzle and smoke as you riddle them with bullets.
Because they're attracted by noise, enemies often disrupt fights with other players, and that's where the best moments emerge. One minute you might be fighting hard with another team preventing you from extracting, and the next both teams are staring each other out from a distance, no one daring to pull the trigger because it'd mean mutually assured destruction in the form of a roaming rocketeer. Self-preservation seems to outweigh other functions when it comes to human nature.
Again, you still have options in a situation like this. There's a self-charging cloaking device you can use to skulk away from sticky situations and there are many gadgets you can throw to draw the ARC to the enemy position, such as lure grenades and the trusty rubber ducky. Or you could become a legend and get high ground, before jumping onto the top of the rocketeer and riding it like Green Goblin while raining bullets and hellfire down on the enemy team.
The game designers at developer Embark do some smart stuff to nudge these moments along, too. First off, there's the time constraints. Matches come in at a brisk 30 minutes, and you can spawn into them up to ten minutes in. That means you have to fill your pockets and escape before time's up, otherwise you die in a massive explosion that rocks the map when the countdown ticks down to zero. Unless you have a raider hatch key for a sneaky escape, you have to call for an elevator to take you down to Speranza, and these close off as the match draws to an end, meaning there's only one escape option if you leave it to the last minute.
Elevators also make lots of noise, drawing ARC and alerting other nearby players to the fact you're trying to escape. As things become more desperate, teams begin to plead with each other to escape together so everyone can get out with their loot. In a genius twist, even if you're downed into the state where you can be revived so long as you don't bleed out, you can still push the elevator button and escape as your health ebbs away. Smart players are starting to build their own ARC Raiders etiquette -- if you can't loot, don't kill -- so players can extract together without getting each other botted on.
Then there are the quests, which require you to visit points of interest and scavenge or fix specific things around each map, sending teams to similar locations where they might clash. Your raider also sends up a flare when they die, giving everyone in the match a bead on your location, but these can also be faked with remote controlled flares you can place down and use as a clever distraction.
It's not just visual clues, either. There are security cameras that beep as you pass, or the car alarms that prime if you bump into them, or the ARC turrets firing at you, exploding balls popping, metal detectors beeping, the sound of a missed shot cracking by your ear, or the warble of a snitch scanning the treeline. During night raids, audio is often all you have beyond the cone of your flashlight.
The soundscape in ARC Raiders is phenomenal, giving you a massive amount of audio information despite being relentless and loud and often terrifying. My only major criticism of it, especially with how successful the game has been, is how Embark cheaped out and used AI voice lines for the raiders in match, making them sound more robotic than the ARC you're fighting. It really drags down what's otherwise some of the best audio design to grace a video game. Honestly, your ears will ring for hours after you've attempted to kill the queen.
The queen is a hulking boss robot that guards a harvester stocked with high-tier weapon blueprints, but you also need queen parts to craft those weapons. Just preparing for a fight with the queen takes a few matches of scrounging up supplies, and fighting it takes most of the 30 minutes you have once you're into a match. Getting killed by another team while you're attempting it is uniquely frustrating, but you'd probably do the same in their shoes -- after all, those hullcracker weapons aren't cheap. Maybe next time you'll bring deployable barricades for cover, eh?
You can play ARC Raiders for 50 hours, and you still won't know it all. Just mastering the layered and complex maps -- all the little nooks, the places you can slide through, the safe jumping distances, ledges you can grab, where to slide, where to peek, where to flank, where to hide -- takes hundreds of hours, and that's without the new map, Stella Montis, dropping this month. It's also the early days of this combat sandbox and people still aren't making the most of the gadgets and tools at their disposal, so it's only going to get more dangerous as people push the limits of what's possible and get access to advanced gear.
It's the width of this sandbox that makes ARC Raiders special. Every fight and non-violent interaction with another player is unique and sticks in the memory, giving you a biography's worth of war stories for each map that you can look back on as fond memories. If not for the terrible AI voices, missing quality of life features like the option to quick-craft missing components and some awkwardness around mantling and climbing, it'd be as close to the perfect multiplayer game you could get, if you've got the stomach for it.