As if 2025 wasn’t already packed with fantastic video games, the developers at Embark just had to come along with ARC Raiders, an utterly gorgeous, engrossing, and spectacular third-person multiplayer extraction shooter. I was already hooked after spending plenty of hours in the beta earlier this year and several hours in the server slam earlier this month.
Ahead of launch, Embark invited me and my squad along to a four-hour event to get hands-on with what you’ll all be playing soon enough. Some outlets may choose to label this as a sort of ‘final preview’, but I think I’ve spent enough time with ARC Raiders to bring you some sort of verdict, though, due to the live nature of the game, the final score will be subject to change as we test the game further in a live environment.
So buckle up, charge those shields, and ready your weapons. We’re heading topside in the XboxEra ARC Raiders Review-in-Progress!
The Collapse
ARC Raiders is a multiplayer, PvPvE third-person extraction shooter set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic future where machines rule the surface of the Earth, and humanity – what’s left of it – is living in settlements deep underground. The game itself has been in development for longer than the already released PvP game, The Finals, so for the team at Embark, this has been a long time coming. In terms of themes, the team wanted to explore the potential of space travel, the imminent rise of AI and machines, and the impending ecological collapse of our planet. That’s quite the combination!
ARC Raiders is set in a world where those things converged – huge technological advancements, massive floods, wildfires, and earthquakes – and of course, the rise of the machines themselves. We’re now a few generations beyond those events, and the origin of the ARC machines that rule the surface and prevent humanity from settling is mostly unknown – and this itself is just one of the mysteries that I look forward to uncovering in detail as the community starts to play.
The game itself is set in the South of Italy, in a region known as the Rust Belt. At launch, there are four ‘topside’ locations where we can head up to scavenge for supplies, take on various ARC machines, and potentially encounter other Raiders, whose motives are not always clear.
There are the forests, swamps and abandoned buildings of Dam Battlegrounds, which can be considered a ‘safer’ place to learn the ropes. The Buried City, an entire city engulfed in dunes, filled with apartment buildings and other complexes. The Spaceport, a derelict industrial launch facility filled with old technology to potentially scavenge. We also have the until now unseen Blue Gate, a location that’s a little higher up in the mountains, with towns and underground complexes to explore. The world of ARC Raiders is assuredly beautiful to exist in, even if threats are potentially lurking around every corner as you explore.
Welcome to the Rust Belt
Each location has a map that details to players where more high-value loot and supplies can be scavenged, and each area has rotating conditions that vary things like weather – be it rain or terrifying electromagnetic storms, or the types of ARC enemies that may be present. The team confirmed there’ll even be ‘Night Raids’, which offer even greater challenge and better rewards – though they advise that alongside battling reduced visibility, the presence of ARC machines will be greatly increased.
If you’re feeling brave enough, you can choose to go out there solo, or in teams of three if you’ve got some buddies to raid with. If you do go out there alone, the game will try to prioritise you being matched with other solo players, though for me, this is a team game through and through.
Despite the variety of mechanical beasties that roam the surface and are an ever present threat, the world is full of colour and life. There are wonderful touches, from flocks of birds that will startle should you get too close and give away your position, to world-building environmental storytelling that piques the imagination.
Despite the dystopian backdrop, there’s a surprising amount of colour and vividness to the world Embark has created, and it has a thrilling soundscape to match. The bloop and shrill sirens of ARC machines that have detected you, to the crack and whistle of bullets striking nearby, or the echo of explosions and gunfire from afar. They’ve also done a really great job with the audio created by other players. Keep an ear out for footsteps! This is a game where you will never know quite what to expect, and you should probably wear some headphones.
Safety in Speranza
It is, however, a game of two halves. While combat, scavenging, exploration, and tension are the order of the day on the surface, there’s a whole heap of busy work to be getting on with when you’re underground. You’ll set forth from Speranza, a bustling neighbourhood of the sprawling underground city of Toledo. It’s here where we’ll manage our home and workshop, trade with various vendors, take on quests, and prepare our gear for the many excursions we’ll take topside.
If I had one large criticism or pain point for ARC Raiders, it’s with inventory management, and the sheer number of different items one can scavenge and use. Even after many hours in, understanding what breaks down into what, and choosing what items need to be prioritised, is still fairly confusing, and something that only large amounts of time with the game will ever truly resolve. On a controller, navigating these menus, filled to the brim with different parts and supplies, or finding and accepting quests just doesn’t feel intuitive.
The team has done their best to make it detailed and useful, but I found the pop-ups to occasionally get in the way of what I was trying to do, and I spent far more time wrangling around tons of boxes of stuff like pipes, or plastics, or metal parts….the list is endless, and a bit daunting. You do have a chicken named Scrappy to help you out, which is weird, but amusing. Scrappy will routinely gather basic parts in reasonable quantities, and can be upgraded and customised to help you sort things out a bit. Eventually, you’ll be able to build different benches in your workshop to craft your own gear from your stash, and longer-term progression will tie in to your ability to craft better items and augments to mix up your playstyle.
You’ll also be able to customise your character from a selection of predefined faces and hairstyles – I will take this opportunity to complain loudly about the lack of a mohawk and any sort of facial hair, which feels pretty jarring in any sort of dystopian future. Customisation also extends to the outfits and equipment you can carry, with a heap of colour options, backpack types, charms, and so on. Expect there to be plenty of monetised customisation options for players to indulge in and strut their fancy stuff on the surface. Thankfully, some cosmetics can be unlocked by completing different quests via vendors, and just generally levelling up.
Fail to Prepare, Prepare to Fail
The meat of the game, of course, is going out on missions to the surface. You can prepare for these beforehand and equip your character accordingly for what may lie ahead. Do you risk taking your best guns and gear, with the threat that you could lose them all should you be killed? Perhaps you take the basic ‘free’ loadout, and hope that you can survive long enough to loot the surface and make it back unscathed? These sorts of decisions are demanded of you every match, and the choice you make will likely depend on what you have to spare and what you’re willing to risk.
Augments can be equipped to set the tone for the type of player you’re going to be. You might take a combat augment, which allows you to equip heavier shields at the cost of moving more slowly and being able to carry far less loot. Perhaps supplies and scavenging are the priority, and with the Looting Augment, you’ll be able to carry more.
There are also a ton of different weapons to find, from SMGs, Assault Rifles, Snipers, and LMGs, in addition to blueprints in the wild, so you can craft your own. There are also attachments and all sorts of gadgets to discover, from a Halo Infinite-style grapple gun to deployable zip lines, ARC cloaking devices, and all sorts of grenade variants. There’s a lot to find out there.
Everything you do topside earns you XP, and every skill point you acquire can be fed into a rather extensive skill tree across Conditioning, Mobility, and Survival. These offer all sorts of perks like better stamina regeneration, making less noise, and so on.
Topside Terror
The best thing about ARC Raiders is how it makes you feel. Each journey topside is an exhilarating step into the unknown, and you can never be quite sure how things are going to go. Once out in the world, paying attention to the environment around you is critical to survival, and you only have a maximum of thirty minutes to get in and get out. You might plan a quick jaunt to grab some specific supplies, and then quickly make your way to an exit. Calling for extraction will alert nearby players, so you should always prepare to defend yourselves until extraction arrives.
As each location can change in terms of weather and time of day, there can be a remarkably different feel depending on how that all ends up, and while you may intend to raid a certain location or explore a certain area, gunshots in the distance or the shrill alarm of an ARC spotter zoning in to something or someone nearby may immediately change your well-laid plans.
Seeing that tell-tale flare shoot up into the sky, signalling that a Raider has been downed, will draw instant attention, much like having to deal with any ARC that crosses your path and engages with you. This constant tension is addictive to say the least, and is utterly engrossing. Often, you don’t want to fire your gun too soon, and we found it best to wait and see what happens on the horizon before picking a specific direction.
Should you get into a firefight, you’re equipped with a shield that offers you some limited protection. It will spark and fizz out, yelling to cries of “I cracked someone!” as your team hunts down your adversaries. When victorious, don’t dawdle on looting your opponents. Spend too long in one place, and you’ll find yourselves on the defensive. It is possible to be downed and revived, and we were witnesses to some incredibly tense firefights in our time thus far, where one of our squad made a heroic recovery and revived us all, or we all fell, losing everything we’d found thus far.
One gripe is being ‘third-person’d‘, as a member of my squad liked to call it. The very nature of a game like ARC Raiders is that due to the camera choice and style of game, it’s easy to remain hidden and then use the camera to peak round corners. It’s fairly normal for a game of this style, but when fighting against an enemy that’s higher than you on a rooftop, or looking at you from around a corner, it can be a bit frustrating.
We also experienced some adorable moments. At one point, my teammate let out a cry that a Raider was close, before six or more Raiders appeared on the cliff above us, shouting out over the comms that they came in peace and that we should all team up. The latter part of that match was spent rolling over the map and any ARC we came across, before it all fell apart in the underground Blue Tunnel itself. Peace and friendship can be found out here, but it is fragile. Be careful who you trust.
Beyond Launch
We’ve yet to see the true ‘end-game’ of ARC Raiders, and I feel it’ll be a while before we do, just due to the sheer number of things to unlock and do across the game. Night Raids have yet to be experienced – at least by me, and I’m curious about world events that will draw large numbers of players to one location. More than that, though, is that I still have questions around balance. What happens when lots of players have really good weapons and gear, and how viable will it be for weaker, less well-equipped players to take them on and win? Can the lower-end weaponry still compete, given good planning, strategy, and luck? That remains to be seen.
The team has teased another location to discover beyond what’s available at launch. They call this place Stella Montis. This seemingly snowy region is located in the mountains up North of the Rust Belt, ‘beyond the Blue Gate’. It’s heavily implied that the players will have a role to play in unlocking this new region, helping to expand the game directly.
Embark has shared that they plan on continually building and updating the world of ARC Raiders to keep things feeling fresh, while also trying new ideas to ‘push the boundaries‘. For them, the launch of ARC Raiders is just the beginning, and they seem pretty excited to see what we’ll do out there.
See you Topside
ARC Raiders walks a fine balance. It’s an extraction shooter seemingly purpose-built for the hardcore players, yet is surprisingly accessible, whether you’re playing with friends or going out there solo. It’s thematically dystopian, yet utterly beautiful to look at, full of bright splashes of colour and a cohesive overall design. It can be tense, thrilling, and downright terrifying, but it is also filled with surprisingly sweet and endearing moments with the sort of random, social interaction I’ve not enjoyed since the early days of Sea of Thieves. This is ARC Raiders, and it’s just the beginning.
It’s one of the best multiplayer games of the year, standing toe to toe with the giants in the genre. I’ll see you topside.
ARC Raiders launches globally at 12:00 CET on October 30th.
Update: After spending plenty more time with the game post launch, I stand by my verdict. If anything, I love it a little bit more than I already do. Arc Raiders is one of the best games of the year.
ARC Raiders
Played on
PC
PROS
- An 'accessible' Hardcore shooter. Crazy times.
- Super-well optimised
- Cohesive visual design
- Absolutely gorgeous
- Full of wild moments - both terrifying and hilarious
CONS
- Inventory and resource management is a pain - especially on a pad
- End Game remains unclear...for now.
Same sentiment, I would have prefered it to be First Person weirdly enough.
This looks so very cool. In the video review I saw a robot like enemy, but are there more CPU controlled enemies next to potential enemy players?
Pre-ordered the deluxe edition and looking forward to jumping in tomorrow as I played ten hours in the Server Slam and really enjoyed the game. Perspective wise, im the opposite. I easily prefer third person because you get a wider field of view, a better cover system and while people complain about the “peaking”, you can do the same so it evens out.
Arc Raiders reminds me of The Division, Outriders and State of Decay in many ways so being in third person is a huge positive at least for me. Besides, with so many games like this being in first person, first person, first person, it’s great to see a game like this finally be in third person as it gives you a different feel to the game and requires you to use a different strategy and change your play style.
Great review in progress by the way Jon. Have to watch that 45 minute gameplay video for Blue Gate. All the environments look awesome.
There’s mostly flying robot enemies that can spot you and call for reinforcements against you but there’s also a few ground robot enemies as well.
Yes, you can get into fights against other players and the robots at the same time. When I played the Server Slam, 4 out of the 6 deaths I had was because I was weakened by another player OR robot and simply didn’t have enough time to heal my health and charge my shield and thus, was downed by the player OR robot depending on who weakened me first.
So say you get into a fight with a player and survive, the gunfire can attract robots to where you’re at and if you don’t heal quickly enough or find a place to hide, the robots can basically finish you off. This can also go the other way where you destroy a robot but a player comes and finishes you off.
It’s very tense and very intense at the same time.
Arc Raiders is the first ever game that I will be playing that has a PvP element to engage with. It’s the second extraction shooter that I have ever played. First being Helldivers 2 which I played for about 6 hours on PS5 at launch but playing solo, there’s just no way unless you’re just amazing at these games.
With Arc Raiders, you get queued against other solo players and while solo players can “team up” with each other, it’s not official or listed as a team so even if two players join up and one of them gets downed, the other can’t revive them because they’re not part of a “team”.
I ran across a few solo players when I played the Server Slam. I never ran into any group of players.
Watching videos from the Tech Test 2 in the summer, what drew me in was the setting being post apocalyptic, the realistic graphics, the third person perspective along with a lot of elements that’s in The Division, Outriders and State of Decay which I all loved.
So yeah, im hyped to say the least!!! lol
The map is full of different ARC beasties and obviously, other Raiders.
Very nice! Can definitely see myself getting this one, probably still this year or so. Looks to be an awesome experience.
It is. And this is coming from someone who’s not interested in PvP whatsoever but the game itself and the core of it is so damn good and very appealing to me that I decided to go outside of what im used to playing and give Arc Raiders a chance. Based on the Server Slam that I played, I would say that I made a good decision even though admittedly, I do have to adapt to playing against human players and get better at the game.
Still new to this extraction shooter PvEvP gameplay style. I’ll probably watch a bunch of gameplay and see what it’s like. I guess it’s good for this game that Bungie delayed theirs (no direct competition).
@Sikamikanico
Hey Jon, just a heads up for you. There’s a Mohawk hair style in the game but it’s part of the Raider Packs. The Raider Packs can be purchased using Cred which is the blue icon the top right of the screen which you can get after every raid. I think the hair style was on page 4.
It’s the most intense game I played in years. Sound design is so good, it feels like I’m really there.
Also love the proximity chat, it sounds like you are ingame. You can even use filters so your voice sounds different to others.
Can’t wait to dive in again later today.