ARC Raiders is an upcoming multiplayer extraction shooter from Embark Studios, the team behind 2023’s hit first-person shooter The Finals. Last week, CGMagazine was invited to go hands-on with an early build of ARC Raiders and explore Embark’s vision of a lethal, post-post-apocalyptic Earth.
After an excruciatingly tense nine-hour tour through three robot-infested hellscapes, I can report that ARC Raiders is shaping up to be a top-tier third-person sci-fi adventure — and one of the most distinctive extraction shooters to date.
ARC Raiders is set in the distant future, long after Earth was devastated by a mysterious mechanical force called ARC. To escape their ruthless oppressors, humanity’s survivors retreated deep underground into bastion cities such as our home, Speranza. To keep Speranza alive, its bravest citizens — and a rooster named Scrappy — must return to the surface to scavenge the ruins, fill their backpacks with recyclable loot and race home before ARC forces overwhelm the area.
“ARC Raiders is shaping up to be a top-tier third-person sci-fi adventure — and one of the most distinctive extraction shooters to date.”
The gameplay loop in ARC Raiders follows the classic extraction beats: shoot, loot, scoot, return to base and reboot. It’s a familiar structure with an execution that’s anything but. What you’re shooting, where you’re looting and how you’re scooting puts ARC Raiders in a class of its own. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that it looks and sounds incredible.
The third-person gunplay is snappy and satisfying, and the vast, clamberable environments open endless possibilities for creative positioning. Firefights unfold with a smoothness you’d expect in a Star Wars: Battlefront game—but quickly spiral into desperate chaos. Guns degrade quickly, ammo is scarce, and each shot is an invitation for more violence. As rewarding as it is to skeet-shoot ARC drones out of the sky with your pistol, their flaming wreckage lingers around you before falling, broadcasting your location with a bright red spotlight and a donut of billowing smoke.
ARC is a terrifyingly dynamic menace, patrolling the skies and lurking in the ruins. Each bot is specialized to be the apex predator of its environment. Small quadcopters feverishly hunt you down, snitching your location to swarms of tougher bots. Sentry turrets and hornet drones deal heavy damage from afar, while tiny, face-hugging spider bots can leap from the shadows and force you into combat. Even seemingly low-level encounters can whittle down the ammo reserves of well-equipped raiders, shifting the match from fast-paced run-and-gun action to hide-and-seek survival horror.
But ARC isn’t the only threat in this world; as in ours, the old aphorism holds true: hell is other people.
In a solo round of ARC Raiders, simply having the audacity to defend myself against killer robots made enough noise to grab the attention of every psychopath on the server. Instead of aiding a fellow human in his hour of need, they enthusiastically rejected their humanity, murdering me in cold blood before turning on each other to fight over my backpack’s worth of deflated soccer balls and broken computer parts.
Those soccer balls were meant to be a gift for Scrappy, my rooster. No one in that melee had any idea how hard I fought to murder the man I stole them from. The injustice was unbearable.
Even with a team backing you up in trios, you’ll need a solid plan. Pitched PvP battles can quickly devolve into wars of attrition, where both sides start picking their shots to conserve ammo and take long timeouts to craft bandages and repair their weapons. But even if you win, the sounds of gunfire and the flares rising from downed raiders will almost certainly draw the attention of every loot-hungry vulture on the map—and if not them, then certainly the growing legions of ARC.
“The surface world in ARC Raiders is equal parts bleak and sublime.”
Each raid is a balancing act between action and stealth, and every decision is a gamble made with your gear. Success usually came from methodical play—picking fights carefully, crouch-walking everywhere and checking ziplines for roosting birds before sliding across. But every match was also a chance to explore ARC Raiders’ real strength: its world.
The surface world in ARC Raiders is equal parts bleak and sublime. Desperation hangs over every frame — it’s not just that the world was destroyed, but that the ruins have already been picked clean. Each of the three maps showcased in the preview was rich in detail and staged to tell stories about the world that was and how the apocalypse unfolded.
It’s a world whose scars have scars, but even those layers of history are being erased by the forests growing through the wreckage. Atmosphere is important, but here it’s not just visual splendour; the level designers have used the devastation to make each zone as fun to jump and clamber across as possible.
The best example of this is the map Buried City. The map consists of a labyrinth of low-rise, Mediterranean-style apartments on one side and high-rise brutalist buildings on the other, split down the middle by a near-future highway, and all connected through the rolling sands of a desert that’s reclaiming the city.
The collapsed walls and unpredictable dunes come together as a dynamic arena where there’s no safe space to have a firefight. The dunes are the great equalizer; they connect the blown-out windows and collapsed walls of third-storey apartments to the roofs above and the courtyards below. Rival raiders shooting up at you from the metro station are only a cheeky flank or zipline away from shooting down through the skylight above you.
Nine hours is a long time to preview any game, but when my squad was wiped with 10 minutes left in the final session, we had a shared sense of urgency to squeeze in one more round. So, we cobbled together loadouts from whatever junk we had left and returned to the surface, seeking only death or glory.
“ARC Raiders pulled that off pre-beta.”
The first squad we rolled up on gladly obliged. Unfortunately for us, they had gone into that final round with quality weapons and heavy shields. They gunned us down without mercy—and if I’m being honest, with very little effort.
With two minutes left before the servers closed, there was still debate over whether it was worth trying one more time. No one was ready for it to end.
The mark of a great multiplayer game is when a team of strangers from around the world can get stomped, die laughing, and feel bummed when they can’t go back for more. ARC Raiders pulled that off pre-beta. I have high hopes for this one—it scratched my extraction shooter itch that’s been unreachable since Hunt: Showdown – 1896.
A release date has yet to be announced, but ARC Raiders is set to launch in 2025 for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S at a price of $40. For those who can’t wait, players can request access to the upcoming Steam tech test, running from April 30 to May 4. See you on the surface, Raider.
