Robot apocalypses are two a penny in video games, and ARC Raiders follows this fine tradition of having the world dominated by deadly machines who will attack and kill humans on sight. We’re a fairly hardy bunch, though, so we’ve burrowed underground to found the city of Speranza, with a select few coming out to the surface to scavenge from what remains of our civilisation. These fearless individuals, known as Raiders, are risking their lives and their possessions every time they head to the surface, with danger coming from the robotic ARC as well as the other Raiders who are fighting over the scraps.
At least, that’s what the developers wanted to happen; in reality, something rather more wonderful has occurred. Strangers are working together, sharing loot, and helping each other out in firefights against the ARC. You can go and shoot someone in the head if you want to be a dick, and there are still players who do that, but from my experience, most players are friendly and want to work together. This is even more impressive when you consider just how fractured and divided the real world is. It also makes the times when some butthead with a sniper rifle picks you off from a roof 500 metres away even more depressing. Welcome to the future.
ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter, so you get to keep anything you can carry back out of a mission, and if you die? Well, you’ll come back empty handed, an even loose whatever kit you took in. That makes setting your loadout for a run on the surface and how much you’ll risk a key decision point.
There are two weapon slots with twenty weapons available, some of which can be bought and some which can be crafted, and its the usual mix of shotguns, pistols and rifles. Each weapon can be upgraded three times to improve its performance, and you can further customise it with stocks, larger magazines and sights. Guns chosen, it’s time to select an Augment which increases carry space, weight capacity, and shield compatibility. Yes, despite wearing rags and having to recycle ice cream scoops for metal, you have a Dune-style full-body shield to absorb damage. Grab some appropriate ammo, of which there are four types, and your final job is to add some grenades and healing items into the quick access slots.
There are five playable maps in ARC Raiders: Dam Battlegrounds, Buried City, Spaceport, The Blue Gate, and the new Stella Montis map, which was unlocked after the game launched. While it’s hard to make an apocalyptic landscape visually exciting, there is enough difference between them all to make them interesting.
The gameplay loop consists of sneaking around and scavenging items from buildings whilst avoiding the larger ArC enemies. For the first few runs, the smaller enemies are quite a threat and can end your scavenging run very quickly but you soon learn their weak spots or how to evade them altogether. Initially, I did think this was rather boring; you are essentially opening loot boxes under duress. It’s like ripping apart a pack of Pokémon cards while a stick of dynamite fizzles nearby, and most of the time, all you get is a garlic press. Thankfully, the team back at your base has a constant supply of missions which encourage you to go to new areas, and there are remixed versions of each map with modifiers that reduce the number of exits or add fierce lightning storms to spice things up.
ARC Raiders also has a couple of Destiny-style world events such as the Harvester, which requires you to sneak past a Queen – that’s a giant crab robot, not a contestant on Drag Race. Inside the Harvester there’s puzzles to solve while under the threat of being toasted alive, so you need good timing as well as a good aim. It’s a nice little diversion but the game really could do with more of these, and hopefully Embark can add some soon.
Extract successfully from the map via one of the exit stations, and it’s back to your home base to sort through your loot of toasters, ARC parts and rags. There appear to be hundreds of items you can find, some of which are useful, some of which can be recycled into parts, and some of which can be sold. If you enjoy flicking through pages of junk and deciding what to keep, then Arc Raiders is definitely the game for you. Managing your stash and working out what to do with each item is a painfully slow process on a console and the impatient among us – it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me – would benefit from three nice buttons labelled “Sell the trinkets”, “Recycle the junk” and “Keep the good stuff”. Of course, this is less of a problem on PC, where you can zip around menus and sort your stash much more quickly thanks to having a mouse. It’s just much slower and more fiddly on consoles with a gamepad.
On top of your stash you gradually unlock six workbenches that can be used to craft new weapons, health items, shields and other useful tools, all of which require specific materials to upgrade, and tasks from vendors that require specific objects. Tracking what you need for each task is a chore at best and like all apocalyptic games, none of it makes sense. Your chicken – yes, chicken – that scavenges extra resources for you while you are out needs a dog collar and then a cat bed as upgrades. As you only get to see the next step of the upgrade path after your completed the current one there is a good chance you recycled that cat bed to make a bandage a couple of hours ago, which is very frustrating.
After wading through your stash, redeeming some XP in a skill tree, upgrading your weapons and buying a few extra supplies, it is time to head back out to the fun part of the game. How that plays out really depends on if you are going solo or as a team, with the game prioritising matchmaking within those queues. Matched in with solo players I have found the game to be slower and more reliant on stealth, but almost every player I met was friendly and helped out if needed. Go in with two friends as a team and the game plays rather differently, there seems to be many more PvP battles, though there are still some friendlies. Going in as a team also makes the game so much easier, as you can cover each other’s back and the smaller ARC bots really don’t stand a chance when taking fire from multiple directions.
I rather liked the two seemingly unintentional game modes that this created. Jumping in with team gives you are more gung-ho approach where you can be rather more brazen in your exploits, while scurrying around by yourself and meeting the occasional strangers who are also trying survive really enforces the apocalyptic feel of the game.
However, that sense of camaraderie with other Raiders is doing a lot of the heavy lifting as without it, ARC Raiders is fairly generic. The ruined wasteland and scrappy costumes have been seen in a thousands games since Fallout, the crafting and item degradation is nothing new and has been around since, well, Fallout, and the enemy design is really lacking in imagination. Three of the ARCs are just balls that roll around, another three are flying drones, and there are four variants of crabs, ranging from small scuttling creatures to house-sized behemoths who constantly launch missiles at your face.
I have also encountered a couple of technical issues on PS5. Most notably is the pop-in which is really quite noticeable as objects and textures do just appear from thin air even when you are quite close. I have also had a couple of runs where the game either refuses to accept half of the button presses on the DualSense, or decided my character is going to walk in a certain direction no matter what. Quitting out the game completely is the only way to solve these issues, which is really annoying if you have spent ages building up a decent loadout and then have to lose it because of a bug.
Finally, a quick word about Embark’s use of AI voices for the vendors in the game. Your opinions on AI are your own, and I’m not going to tell you otherwise, but I can tell you that, even with Embark hiring actors to create their AI voice banks, the NPC’s sound rubbish. Embark may have saved a few krona using AI, but the end result is nowhere near as good as getting people back into the recording booth.
