Arc Raiders Review | Surface Life
Like an episode of Black Mirror, for the last 4 years airports across the world have recorded sightings of UAP, a synonymous term for unmarked drones. In 2024, New Jersey citizens reported thousands of sightings. This past October, unmarked drones in Europe forced the cancellation of nearly 200 flights.
Every autumn I scroll Reddit looking for the next batch of sightings, and a thought creeps into my mind: what if the drones aren’t Russia or North Korea or whatever the prevailing theory is on r/UFOs… what if our machines are starting to turn on us?
Strange lights in the icy nordic sky might seem like a weird way to start a video game review, but it’s this sort of familiarity that makes Embark Studios’ Arc Raiders so distinct and contemporary. Despite some shortcomings, the game feels like it was made for a future that’s right on our doorstep.
The game takes place in 2180, after an AI-powered machine army, called the Arc, wiped out most of humanity. What was left of civilization escaped underground. Among the abandoned tunnel systems, we carved out a settlement known as Speranza. It’s here that the story of your raider begins.
The gameplay loop in Arc Raiders is fast and deceptively simple. You craft weapons, bandages, shield recharges, and bullets. Pick a key for your safe pocket, or if you’re feeling lucky, select the free loadout and receive a cheap gun and a grenade or two. Then you choose a map, hop in a subway cart and jettison to the surface.
This isn’t another roguelike; it’s an extraction shooter, which means the loot you find is yours to keep. That is, unless another raider decides to ruin your day and take it from you.
In the dishevelled offices of Space Station, or the sandblasted apartments of Buried City, you loot the desks, picture frames, and toasters that have remained untouched for decades. If you extract at the end of the raid and make it back underground, you’ll break down these things into their basic components – wires, scrap metal, springs – and use them for crafting.
While you’re out raiding, one thing becomes very clear: Embark Studios really nailed the audio design in Arc Raiders. The sounds of footsteps rattle off the rusty servers in Dam Battlegrounds. Sound is crucial to your survival, too. You spend large chunks of the raid pinpointing far off gunshots, the footsteps on the floor below you, and the distinct sounds of Arc flying above as you scour a landscape that was taken from us.
And the proximity chat, especially in the solo que, can travel a considerable distance. Which is all to say that whatever feeling a specific zone offers, it’s very much heightened by the sounds of players moving through and engaging with the environment.
At the time of writing, Arc Raiders ships with five highly detailed maps, but my favourite (it’s not even close) is Stellar Montis. It’s the meanest and hardest to navigate, full of cramped tunnels and nightmare-inducing encounters with Arc called Shredders. It’s also the map I’ve had the most memorable player experiences.
The dynamics of this world feel alive because it’s not just you against endless waves of Arc. The people you meet on the surface are real and very much on their own journeys of survival. Arc Raiders is a PvPvE, or person versus person versus enemy, game where your fellow raiders can either engage the Arc with you, or take pot shots at your head as you fend off a swarm of Hornets.
There’s a ruthlessness at the centre of the game. A sense that your time on the surface is short, and the people you meet just might be desperate enough to hurt you the moment you turn your back on them.
I’ve put around 30 hours into my character, and he looks a little like me: balding, nearly past his prime, but still willing to head to the surface and pick among the scraps. He’s seen a lot, too. There have been good samaritan raiders willing to escort him to a secret weapons cache, and cruel raiders who swore they were friendly only to knock him out seconds before extracting with a pack full of loot.
The player versus player interactions is what gives this game its edge; it feels more like a social experiment than a traditional looter shooter, such as Destiny. There are some fantastic Reddit conversations applying game theory to player interaction in Arc Raiders. Other threads feel ripped out of modern news headlines, arguing that despite the rise in violence, there are still some good raiders out there willing to help.
This evolving state of play is more than just the game’s meta being worked on like a hunk of steel at an anvil. It feels like contributing to a digital-socio dynamic in the same way as the early days of World of Warcraft players trying to short specific items in the auction house.
Which is to say the reason I want to keep playing Arc Raiders, and the reason I think about it when I’m away from my Playstation, is its evolution as a new cultural touchpoint. It’s the first game to successfully fuse everyone’s favourite bug-brained activities, shooting, looting and crafting, with the punishingly niche extraction shooter genre.
However, there are some downsides that Embark Studios hasn’t fully cracked while hitching their drones to the extraction genre. For a game that wants you to love the loot grind, many items you find can only be stacked in 5s or 3s, meaning inventory management becomes its own minigame – and not a particularly fun one.
The hub world, once you acclimate to navigating around, is basically a series of menus and static shops. It would be amazing if Embark Studios developed Speranza as a real location, like Destiny 2’s Tower, to craft weapons, get quests, and mess around with friends between raids.
And last, there is the big question: will we raiders evolve or devolve? Will the game turn into a ruthless PvP deathmatch, or will we continue to focus on the Arc and their foothold across the surface?
It’s all up to Embark Studios and how they envision the game space. Apparently, they have 10 years of planned content in development, so time will tell.
For now, Arc Raiders gives its players a chance to re-experience surface life. That forgotten place with crisp mountain air and murmuring brooks and swarms of wasps. Except this time, the wasps are killer drones, and fighting Arc seems like the perfect sort of practice we need before our own AI uprising. I’m joking, of course. But I still recommend you get out there and sharpen your looting skills.
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