After years in development, multiple playtests, previews, and server slams, Embark Studios’ PvPvE sci-fi extraction shooter ARC Raiders has finally gone live. Does the studio’s sophomore title live up to the wild hype that’s been building over the past year? After spending what is, frankly, an embarrassing amount of time with ARC Raiders this past weekend, I can say the answer is an emphatic yes.
For a live-service title, the launch of ARC Raiders has been remarkably smooth, with servers holding up under some hefty player counts—over 350,000 on Steam alone. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s a third-person shooter that pits players not only against each other but also against armies of murderous drones. As an extraction shooter, matches unfold against a ticking clock, where raiders must scavenge loot, complete missions, and escape before time runs out.
ARC Raiders takes place in the distant future, long after a force of killer machines known as ARC has laid waste to Earth and driven humanity underground. Players take on the role of raiders—subterranean gunslingers who live in Speranza, a Zion-like city buried somewhere beneath the Alps. To keep their refuge alive, they must venture to the surface, emerging like greedy cicadas to scavenge and steal anything not bolted down. But the ruins of post-apocalyptic Italy are still haunted by swarms of ARC, relentlessly hunting the final humans.
“For a live-service title, the launch of ARC Raiders has been remarkably smooth, with servers holding up under some hefty player counts—over 350,000 on Steam alone.”
For a raid, players arm up and take a tube ride to one of five surface-world maps. Once topside, they scour the wreckage of broken spaceports, buried cities, battered dams, and scarred mountain villages. As they sift through debris, they’ll have to avoid detection by all manner of specialized killbots—and deal with other raiders. Sometimes violently, other times with dance emotes or rizzful proximity chat.
The goal is to find treasure, but unfortunately, most of what’s left is trash. Trash management sits at the core of ARC Raiders’ gameplay loop, and it’s likely to be the make-or-break feature for most players. It’s part of a progressive crafting system built on upcycling: you collect trash to turn into junk, junk into stuff, stuff into gear, and gear into better gear.
The better your gear, the safer you’ll be when you head back out to collect even more trash. You can also build specialized kits for missions, boss fights, or just going in for some PVP. But the main goal never really changes—it’s always about gathering more. Boss fights and missions exist primarily to get rare parts, and aside from looting bodies and a little XP, there’s no real reward for killing other players. There isn’t even a killfeed—just the satisfying pop of a raider flare shooting into the air when you down a stranger.
This matryoshka-doll style of inventory management is precisely what’s kept extraction shooters from going mainstream. What makes ARC Raiders different is that it rebalances the entire system to make it more accessible. It offers endless free loadouts and a marketplace for guns, gear, and curated trash. If all you want is a decent loadout, the only things worth keeping an eye out for are tradable seeds and salable trinkets. The gear you can get this way won’t be top-tier, but it’s good enough.
Usually, it takes hours to gather the resources for high-end gear, but only a moment to lose it all. When you die in an extraction shooter, everything you came in with is gone. It’s not everyone’s idea of a good time, but it reinforces the second pillar of the genre: gambling.
Matches are balanced so that victory is never assured, nudging you to risk better gear for a higher chance at extraction. That casino logic even extends to dumpster diving—when you open a container, its contents reveal themselves one item at a time, making you wait to see what rarity comes next.
It doesn’t matter what you find; sooner or later, you’ll need it. Whether you’re collecting fruit and trinkets to train your junk-hunting rooster, Scrappy, or donating parts to upgrade your base, every piece of trash has a purpose. Unfortunately, you can only carry so much, and greed slows you down. More than once, I’ve loot-goblined too hard and felt my sprint drop to a laboured shuffle. In the final seconds of a match, I’d be mere feet from the extraction elevator, only to have my wheezing, over-encumbered ass sniped by a PVPer looking for easy kills.
Congrats on the headshot, B00ty_Snorkle. All I wanted was some fruit for my rooster. I hope you choke on those ill-gotten olives.
There’s more to ARC Raiders than trash collection, though. The other layers of this post-apocalyptic onion are exploration, third-person shooting, and socializing.
The combat deserves special mention—it’s absolutely glorious. Controls are simple, movement is grounded, and weapons are heavy and deliberate, but firefights play out fast—and thanks to ARC—unpredictably. Guns start to break down with each shot, and a single hit to your shields can leave you open to distant snipers. If you don’t choose your engagements carefully, you can lose rare gear in seconds. Even careful ambushes can go to hell thanks to roaming ARC drones and opportunistic third parties.
“The combat deserves special mention—it’s absolutely glorious.”
One fight my team got into involved camping the exit of a high-value loot area. When the other squad tried to make off with the goods, we pounced—dropping two instantly and cracking the third man’s shield. Knowing he was finished, he lobbed a desperate shot over the horizon at a distant Rocketeer—one of the most powerful mechs in the game. We were halfway through looting their still-warm bodies when the Rocketeer finally arrived, nuking us from above in a single volley of rockets.
I crawled my down-but-not-out body over to a shrub out of sheer spite, to make sure no one benefited from my failure (also to hide my shame). As I lay dying, I watched a lone scavenger begin looting my dead teammates—only to be downed by a single round from somewhere off-screen—pure chaos.
The most interesting element of ARC Raiders is the one I assumed would be the most corrosive—the community. But man, was I off the mark. Extraction shooters are notoriously toxic, which makes sense; it’s a genre where you turn yourself into a wandering piñata. But because ARC is so dangerous, and players’ shopping lists depend so much on luck, PVP usually isn’t the issue—especially in solo. I’ve never played a competitive shooter where so many people are willing to band together to collect apricots.
Sometimes, entire solo lobbies move in herd formation, obliterating any clanker that dares to beep in our general direction. The de facto greeting among the Raiders has become “We cool?” The answer is almost always yes. The game’s only been out for a few days, but a meta is already forming where players bring in tools designed to help out hurt strangers. It’s bizarre—and I can’t express how much I love it.
Don’t get me wrong, assholes abound—but they don’t last long. If you show up wrong or take down someone minding their own business, you’ll quickly become the most hunted thing on the map. And since there are no player tags, a murder ratchets up the server’s psychic tension, turning the nameless lobby into the blood test scene from The Thing. Players show off weapons, state where they were, and remind everyone who they are by talking about what they were looking for. Most of last night, I was Prickly Pear Guy.
Each match is tense, but friendly. I really hope it lasts.
Some of the community’s reactions might stem from the maps themselves. They’re beautiful, and people want to take them in. From the serene mountain vistas of Blue Gate to the colossal architecture and ARC husks of Space Port, the world invites quiet exploration. It feels chaotic and lived in, yet eerily still. On a map like Blue Gate—where the soundscape is little more than wind gusts and rustling trees—it almost feels like no one wants to be the one to break the silence.
“In case it’s not clear—I love ARC Raiders. It’s my game of the year.”
I’ve heard ARC Raiders called “cinematic” a lot over the past few months, but that’s an understatement. The art direction captures the sublime—the feeling of being humbled, or overwhelmed, by something greater than yourself. ARC is unstoppable, and the sheer scale of each map means you’ll never cover all the ground in a single run. Despite the unfathomable violence unfolding around you, you remain small enough that it’s usually happening in the distance. When it’s not, it’s personal—a fight close enough to trash-talk, or with something so small that you didn’t hear it coming. None of it makes any difference to the mountains or the dunes.
ARC Raiders is a game of moments. Every frame is beautifully lit and meticulously staged. Graphically, it’s relatively standard, but the way everything is composed makes it one of the most stunning games you’ll play this year. The sound design is equally impressive. From the echoes and reverberations of ARC and gunfire to the subtle shifts in ambient noise as you move from forests to hills, towers to deserts, the audio is as awe-inspiring as the environments themselves.
If you play ARC Raiders (which you should), eventually you’ll be loading into maps without any quest in mind. It’s a world that you’ll want to explore. There isn’t much story and almost no characters worth mentioning, but the world itself has a personality. Divining its history as you crawl through its wreckage is more compelling than some story-driven RPGs I’ve played this year (I’m looking at you, Vampire: The Masquerade- Bloodlines 2).
It’s a great game to get lost in. To wander around, meeting strangers and letting the world shape some interesting stories.
Inevitably, you’ll find yourself in a twenty-minute firefight against squads, solos, and ARC. As the extraction timer ticks down and massive fireballs rain from the sky, the absurdity of ARC Raiders starts to sink in. With a broken shield and no bullets, you grab your crowbar-ax thingy and charge down the hill into the fray, using proxy chat to forge a quick alliance—hoping it holds until the elevator arrives.
Even if it does, there’s no guarantee a burning drone won’t drop you to your knees before the round ends. As shockwaves ripple across the map, you might crawl on all fours into the final lift to Speranza. If you survive, you finally realize that all of this was just to bring back a comfy pillow for your rooster. In ARC Raiders, everything we do, we do for Scrappy. His joy is our prize.
In case it’s not clear—I love ARC Raiders. It’s my game of the year. The only fly in the ointment, for me and probably many others, is the genre itself. Extraction shooters can make it hard to tell whether you’re genuinely having fun or just riding the dopamine rush of a gameplay loop not unlike a scratch ticket.
Even so, ARC Raiders is genuinely well-made. It may be a scratch ticket, but it offers a fascinating world to get lost in, kinetic and varied combat to break up the pace, and a style and sense of humour that have fostered one of the most curious and friendly player bases I’ve ever encountered in an online shooter.
See you in the ruins, Raiders, don’t touch my olives.
