ARC Raiders Is the Most ‘It’s Fine’ Game We’ve Played in a While

ARC Raiders is blisteringly, aggressively archetypical, the extraction-est extraction shooter that ever extracted. It’s one of the least surprising games I’ve ever played, holding so much in common with its inspirations that they’re almost comically indistinguishable. For preview purposes, this is a very good thing: If you enjoy other games about scavenging goods while avoiding PvE foes and robbing PvP humans, you’re probably going to like ARC Raiders. If you don’t, then there’s likely nothing new here to tempt you.

This is a game so unabashedly tied to its progenitors that the hero’s default melee weapon is a pickaxe, the same weapon Fortnite metaverse heroes dropping off the Battle Bus lug into combat. That’s a cute enough homage, but it's only the tip of the iceberg for the ways ARC Raiders will be instantly comprehensible to those who play Battle Royale, tree-punching survival games, or extraction. There’s very little that feels truly original, but the components bolted together from other successful live service games click together predictably and produce a satisfying result.

The goal each round is simple: go to the surface and then get back underground alive with better loot than you started with. Two forces stand in the way of that goal. The first are the ARC, AI-controlled battle robots that wander the map searching for any sign of organic life. The ARC are no trifling threat. Even the smallest bots can prove surprisingly dangerous, especially in groups. The little spider-like scurriers are downright upsetting for an arachnophobe like me, and the large crawlers do not mess around. ARC wander the map listening for the sounds of search or battle and swarm any humans they find.

The ARC are especially dangerous in numbers, and there are plenty of subtle little traps set where clusters of different ARC with complementary abilities are placed near one another, sometimes hidden in indoor areas where one can literally trip into them. I met my fate more than once when I got overconfident around ARC. One crawling monstrosity literally spun into the air with its legs like some cyclops spider helicopter. Take down an ARC, though, and the rewards can be worth your trouble. They generally contain ammo and weapon components.

The second and more deadly threat are your fellow raiders. If you choose to play ARC Raiders, you’d best enjoy watching your back, because to quote Casablanca, “this place is full of vultures, vultures everywhere.” It’s often more efficient to fall upon a fully-loaded player who isn’t paying attention than to risk a half hour of bracing open doors in a nearby warehouse, or to lurk near an extraction point and cut down somebody when they’re about to escape. Of course, every other raider is likely looking to do the same to you.

Combat is competent enough to be satisfying. Your third-person avatar moves and controls like most other third-person avatars in modern shooters, with no real irregularities or surprises in the controls. Bullets mostly go where you want them to, depending on the capabilities of your chosen weapon, and melee attack power is substantial. Firearms feel right: SMGs are springy and difficult to control, assault rifles steady and heavy, sniper rifles punch like artillery.

Playing in teams of three adds a bit of depth to the battle, as you and your companions can search and cover for each other much more systematically than is possible with a single raider. Firefights between teams develop a sense of strategy, as coordinating squads deploy flanking tactics and ambushes against groups of foes. Whether calling out directions, overhearing sounds, covering all windows in a room, your three-person squad will find plenty of tension waiting in most buildings.

Cleverly-designed maps draw the characters in. The most lucrative resource hubs are clearly marked, and players flock to the richest areas looking for loot, or hover between the treasures and the extraction areas, waiting to dispossess the luckiest foragers of their well-won gains.

The environments are passable, with the usual collection of rusty warehouses, abandoned apartment buildings, and overgrown vacant lots you’ll find in a lot of post-apocalyptic shooters. Everything is serviceable, but it all kinda feels like they gave Fortnite a coat of Day Z grime and moved on. It’s a boring enough world that it certainly took me out of any chance of getting into the lore. But I don’t really think lore is the big draw here anyway. ARC Raiders is meat loaf without much plate presentation, but the meat loaf is tasty if a little cold.

Every drawer and cabinet is a potential source of wealth: crafting components, ammunition, shields, healing items, and weapons. Ammunition is properly segmented enough to keep you hungry as you scavenge and construct guns. Light, medium, heavy, and shotgun ammo variants are available early on to locate in the overworld, craft in your lair, or purchase underground. Materials have the usual, predictable levels of rarity corresponding to color, with certain colors granting the ability to develop more useful or rare items. A single special pocket in your inventory allows you to keep one special discovered item safe even in the event of your death, so that you can haul your rarest finds home even when you die.

Some containers take time to open and generate quite a bit of noise when manipulated, which is a delightful tension-raising mechanic that I really appreciated. Opening one of these was especially harrowing when playing solo... you can really feel the vulnerability with your camera locked forward, not knowing what passing robot or player might discover you as you make an ugly racket jimmying a door.

You spend your time between rounds underground, where you convert your ill-gotten gains into an ever-escalating series of crafting tables allowing for the creation of ever-more-elaborate gear. You can also choose to straight liquidate materials and finds for cash, and purchase fully-created items at in-game stores. There’s also some part of crafting that involves a live rooster. I never figured that out.

As you explore the world above, you gain experience which opens up access to a series of Skill Trees. Selecting various branches can help you optimize your avatar to your playstyle, increasing combat ability, mobility, or stealth. The different abilities are clearly labeled, and most are useful enough that every step feels like real progress.

Character design with default options is pretty rough, but a number of better textures and outfits open up when you apply premium currency. I deliberately made my guy look as bleak and sad as possible using only default options, but my multiplayer partner had this whole ZZ Top Man With No Name vibe going on... I was envious.

ARC Raiders previews pretty well, perhaps because its design conservatism makes it so instantly familiar. There’s absolutely nothing here to challenge what came before, but sometimes, that’s okay. Overall, the ARC Raiders loop seems pretty well tuned to satisfy: make it to the surface to loot and kill, bring your goods and experience back underground to improve your abilities, head back up stronger to find stronger gear, and repeat. There are worse ways to spend an afternoon.

Jared Petty is a former IGN editor who likes writing about how wonderful and silly video games are. You can find him at Bluesky as Bluesky as pettycommajared.