Arc Raiders review for PC, PS5, Xbox Series X

Embark Studios is a relatively new name in the industry, but backed by big players who are passionate about making incredible games with a small team. Their first release two years ago, The Finals, was released to boundless praise for how fun and unique it was. The Finals was Embark’s foray into the genre of arena class shooters a la Team Fortress. With Arc Raiders, they’re dipping their toes into the ever-tumultuous extraction shooter genre. Extraction shooters haven’t exactly been known up to this point for their ease of dropping in for casual players, so a large, high quality, colorful, and casual friendly game was not really something I think many expected to get from the genre in general. Embark Studios has come in strong with Arc Raiders though, delivering thoughtful design and flow decisions that not only make it good for people who have never enjoyed the hardcore nature of extraction shooters, but also making it just plain fun.

Arc Raider’s “Extraction shooter” genre itself is a bit occluded behind some knowledge, considering it’s not exactly been one we’ve seen much representation for in the AAA sphere, so let me take a paragraph at the beginning here to catch those unaware up to speed. What is an extraction shooter? An extraction shooter is typically a PvPvE game where you and many other players deploy onto a large map similar to that of a battle royale. The difference typically being that you spawn randomly on the map rather than choosing a drop point and players do not always spawn at the same time. You are allowed to bring any equipment along with you that you’d like… the only limitation being that everything you bring must be brought back with you if you’d like to keep it. The goal of every session you play will be to deploy into the overworld and loot to find materials for you to take back to home base and craft better gear. It’s essentially the ultimate form of a gear treadmill, but with the tension permadeath provides. If you die on the field, you drop everything, save for a “safe pocket” item that allows you to protect a single item.

Arc Raiders launched a week ago as of the writing of this, and I’ve gotten time to play a healthy number of rounds and I have to say I’ve been having a great time with it! This truly feels like proof that the extraction shooter genre doesn’t have to be a hardcore game that only the sweatiest gamers can get into. So far when playing solo at least, it almost feels like the game provides so little incentive for killing other players that you would have to actively go out of your way to be malicious to be doing so. With a few barriers Arc Raiders provides to ensure fights don’t end in seconds, I’ve found that asking to work together with any random player through proximity chat actually has a pretty good chance of success. I’ve experienced numerous opportunities to join whole groups of players who all deployed solo and run together to fight off the enemies and loot buildings together. Strength in numbers is huge in Arc Raiders, and being able to get assistance as enemies swarm is major in being able to get higher quality loot. It’s possible to do it alone, but taking a friend or 5 along for the ride will benefit everyone, so why not stick together?

Arc Raiders overall is extremely well polished, looks glorious, and plays great. It’s finally proof that Unreal Engine 5 doesn’t have to mean relying on DLSS. The graphics are good but the set and world design really sells it visually. The gun play is smooth and feels good in third person. It’s done a marvel to come out in such a state while the industry has gotten notoriously worse and worse with unpolished, buggy day one releases. Arc Raiders does a lot right, but if I had to pick one thing out to complain about, it has to be the prices for the included cosmetic microtransactions.

Arc Raiders is a $40 game at release. This is a great value for what it is, and some sort of in-game monetization is to be expected these days. But what we got is… well the cosmetics reek a bit of free-to-play monetization. Arc Raiders offers outfits for $20 a pop in game for some of them and while they all look good, it’s just… not great value for the customers. If Arc Raiders were free to play, these would be a bit pricy, but justifiable considering the rest of the game is delivered completely free. In this case, paying half the price of a game for a skin while also running a battle-pass-esque system does admittedly feel out of place and not quite right. I hope to see this get cut down on a bit in future updates, but at least it’s purely cosmetic.

Where Arc Raiders really excels though, as mentioned above, is the visual aesthetic of both the game at large stylistically and the level design. Arc Raiders looks majestic. There are a total of 4 playable maps at launch, each lovingly designed to ensure at every turn you’re given a view that gives you a wallpaper worthy view on your screen. The game is made with cinematic flair at the forefront and it’s clear in everything it does. From the “Cassette Futurism” stylization of everything to the clear and open landscapes, saying it wows me consistently sounds like an over exaggeration, but once you’re in it, you’ll understand. Every area is completely different fundamentally from the other 3 and even within each of those 4, you’ll easily find 5-8 zones that are visually distinct from one another. This not only helps keep runs fresh, but it also keeps you looking forward to finding out what you’ll run into next nigh indefinitely. The mentioned cassette futurism style runs through the veins of every nook of Arc Raiders. This style isn’t used very often (think the technology used within the Alien franchise), and I think this serves well to keep things interesting within the game. Set pieces feel unique but pulling from real life analog visuals, almost familiar. It’s a surrealistic style that injects a lot of personality into Arc Raiders.

The visual spectacle is all the more impressive when you zoom out a bit and analyze recent industry trends with the engine used in Arc Raiders. Unreal Engine 5 is the hot new thing carrying us into the next generation of graphical fidelity, and with it, a whole slew of games sporting performance issues. If any of the countless examples prior to Arc Raiders are to be believed, you’d be hard pressed to find a game looking as good as Unreal Engine 5 can produce that doesn’t need to rely on DLSS to keep your frames up. But leave it to Embark Studios to prove the AAA industry wrong as Arc Raiders comes in punching hard in this regard as well. With excellent performance across the board for even lower-mid level hardware, Arc Raiders is ready for anyone with a gaming capable PC to join.

The handling of Arc Raiders feels equally good, as whatever they did to capture the animations has been noteworthy itself. There are little nuances in the way the player character moves that has made me let out an interested “huh, never seen that before” on multiple occasions. From the little hop into sprint the character does to the spectacular ragdoll rolls when you’re downed, the smoothness and general quality of every animation is unrivaled. It’s not even just for player characters. The way the NPC enemies (which are entirely robots) move about is notable as well, as they adapt in motion to the damage they sustain in battle. Many of the Arc enemies you will run into utilize multiple thrusters to stay in flight. Shooting at any of these thrusters will eventually cause it to explode and I don’t know how to describe it exactly, but just the way you can watch the entire handling of the flight change as you pop one or two off is so uncanny in how well done it is. That’s not even to mention the terror of the leapers, which, if you’ve seen any video footage of Arc Raiders gameplay online, you’ve undoubtedly seen one of these sail through the air directly at a player’s face. It all comes together in a symphony of motion that makes everything feel so alive and real.

Arc Raiders does more than any other game I’ve seen to deliver an experience to the extraction shooter genre that allows everyone to feel good. This is a release that you shouldn’t miss, and even if you’re afraid of extraction shooters, Arc Raiders is worth your eye if you’re even generally interested in shooter games. At a $40 day one price, it’s more than fair for the quality delivered, and Embark has proven with The Finals that they are reliable with keeping fresh updates dropping regularly to keep the experience fun for regular players. The numbers don’t lie; there’s a reason Arc Raiders is sitting in the top 5 games for player count on Steam since launch day.

Note: Embark Studios provided us with an Arc Raiders code for review purposes.