Get in, get loot, get out, and don't get shot. Those are the core tenets that extraction shooters live and die by. If the gameplay loop is solid and you can bring along friends for the journey, that's a recipe for success. Embark Studios is no stranger to unique takes on familiar competitive genres, with The Finals having been released nearly two years prior. The team is back with a new spin on the extraction shooter genre, one where antagonistic and automated robots have taken over the landscape, and players can only survive above ground for thirty minutes at a time before an unstoppable threat rolls in. This is ARC Raiders.
Few extraction shooters have frustrated me in the same way as ARC Raiders, and perhaps that can be a testament to its distinctive yet disruptive nature in the market. Dying on a run results in losing everything you brought with you, minus the one or two items you might have squirreled away in your prison pocket; the safe space is determined by whichever combat augment you've equipped. The poverty loadout that players can opt to start a run with doesn't have the luxury, so you're at the mercy of other players and ARC bots not to put a bullet in your back as you're trying to extract from the surface safely.
Another downside to jumping into the free loadout is the poor quality of the starting weapons. Of the variety of cheap beginner weapons, only the Ferro (single-shot rifle) and Stitcher (short-range SMG) felt like they were enough to keep me alive in a firefight, while the others felt like the developers were trolling me with how ineffective they could be. With these loadouts, you get one stack of ammo for your weapon, bandages, and one shield recharger. If you survive and make it back home, you can cash in that freebie for a proper augment with a safe pocket, although you might want to sell the gun and craft something more useful.
ARC Raiders' gunplay remains what could be the tipping point for whether it draws in or turns players away. Again, the beginner rank weapons are such a handicap when going out to scavenge, and it isn't until the next tier of weapons that players might actually find a gun that's enjoyable to use (unless you feel like using the ammo-sink Kettle). Once I could craft the Anvil pistol or Il Toro shotgun, those remained a part of my loadout whenever I felt like actually hunting down bots (and players) and not just being a sneaky scav using the free loadout to loot and scoot.
Compared to the armored shells on the ARC enemies scattered about, raiders themselves feel like they're wearing paper rather than a shield meant to take a hit. Getting ambushed by one of the small rolling Pops can completely shred through the basic shield and take a player down to half health. Many of the flying ARC bots can also harass and chase down players just trying to escape with a modest collection of loot.
The ARC is supposed to be the main threat, not the players, but that doesn't always hold true. Players should be wary any time they hear the sound of a nearby raider trying to breach and search a locked container or the telltale sounds of gunfire that might be closer than expected. Run into another player and you're at the mercy of their temperament and whether they even consider you a threat. If you're not a fan of hopping on voice chat and announcing your presence, there's a handy emote wheel where a callout asking the other player not to shoot will be one of the most commonly used phrases during your entire time playing through ARC Raiders. Of course, just because someone declares a truce doesn't prevent them from putting two in your back when you least expect it. Throughout most of my runs, the ones that ended in deadly gunfights were in squads of three; playing solo usually resulted in playing with like-minded players who just wanted to explore or complete the quests they had in their log.
To incentivize players to want to go topside into Toledo, there's a plethora of loot to fill your pockets with of various rarities, not all of which is simply fodder to recycle into base materials or sell for a little extra pocket change. Part of the problem is knowing exactly what is worth taking back and when. Depending on where you are in developing/upgrading the various crafting stations, you might need to seek out and gather different parts. A random cat bed you come across might not seem like much now, but it is one of the crucial components you'll need to bestow upon your rooster companion so that they can passively gather raw materials on your behalf. Each potential upgrade or craftable can be added to your wishlist, so I've tended to include every single crafting station and the usual assortment of Anvil handgun, tier 2 shields and loadouts, and other items I try to bring with me on every run of ARC Raiders so that if I find these materials out in the wild, I'll know to stash those away and save any extra pocket space for rare blueprints or other garbage I can simply sell to expand my storage chest back home.
As I was writing this, I wanted to wait until Stella Montis opened up for players as the latest zone to explore and bring the roster of explorable locales up to five. Embark Studios has had to make some emergency updates and nerf a particular skill at the end of one skill tree, which allowed players to breach and loot security lockers for rare gear (it's since been toned down to reduce the typical rarity of scrap discovered). Stella Montis is a massive enclosed complex with a variety of ARC threats (some unique to the map as well) scattered throughout, but players should also be wary of other players because I've routinely found myself with a bullet to the back after greeting and passing by a fellow raider.
After a brief introductory tutorial mission that results in the player getting shot in the back, the few remnants of the story left to ARC Raiders are told by way of quests and brief interactions with NPCs who never leave their respective shops. If you're looking for some grand story about why the world is constantly besieged by the ARC threat, you'll be left out in the cold. These NPCs also speak with an inhuman, robotic tone that expresses itself with inflections at unnatural times and a cadence that doesn't match what an actual human actor would portray. This is because of Embark Studios' usage of generative AI for these NPC interactions and perhaps all of the vocal callouts out in the world as well. While the NPCs might have been trained off of real human actors, it nevertheless mars what would otherwise be a really solid audio presentation.
Audio is also one of the highlights of ARC Raiders that should get recognized all on its own, minus the aforementioned disgust with the generative AI vocals above. Each weapon sounds distinctively different from afar, and each threat or point of interest has its own audible hum or trill that the player will instinctively pick up over time. Pick up the subtle clicking of a clock off somewhere unseen? The 3D audio on PlayStation 5 will help guide you to its exact location as you turn and run towards a buried raider cache full of useful loot. Sometimes I can even tell what sort of ARC threat I'm about to encounter topside just by the mechanical sounds scattered throughout. The vocal callouts can be adjusted to be either a subtle or loud callout (or you can just leave it on automatic), depending on whether you want to alert any other players in the immediate vicinity to your discovery. The classic Don't Shoot callout will always be shouted out to prevent players from perhaps hearing the message before bullets start flying.
ARC Raiders is also a graphical powerhouse on PlayStation 5 Pro, leveraging the power of Unreal Engine 5 to great effect and better than other games that might use the standard UE5 featureset. It does target a solid 60 FPS and achieves it almost all of the time, thanks in part to a dynamic resolution scaling that Embark Studios themselves have confirmed as ranging between 720p and 2160p on the PlayStation 5 Pro to help sustain that 60 FPS target. Below is a little bit of what players should anticipate for performance:
- PS5: Scalability settings – High Quality; Dynamic Resolution range – 720p-1600p
- PS5 Pro: Scalability settings – Epic Quality; Dynamic Resolution range – 720p-2160p
- Scalability settings affect rendering quality in aspects such as Global Illumination, Shadows, Reflections, Post Processing, Texture resolution and filtering, VFX, View Distance, etc.
All in all, ARC Raiders is a phenomenal entry in the growing loot-and-scoot genre, or extraction shooter if you want to be more technical about it. While the gunplay suffers in the early stages with inferior tier one weaponry, it shines through once you start developing squad tactics and learn the ins and outs of besting the array of lethal ARC threats throughout Toledo. I wanted to wait until the first major content push from Embark Studios before finalizing my thoughts, and the inclusion of Stella Montis has brought a new flavor of psychological warfare to escalate this extraction shooter to greater heights.
[Editor's Note: ARC Raiders was reviewed on the PlayStation 5 Pro. Review code was provided by the publisher.]
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