Arc Raiders is primed to be the next big thing

Arc Raiders is the next game that wants to eat Escape from Tarkov’s lunch. An extraction shooter from Embark, a team of former Dice veterans and creators of The Finals, it is quite unlike anything else in the genre, thanks to the vibes, the quests, and the mechanics. 

Let’s start with the vibes. Arc Raiders is set on an arid Earth, where dunes sweep over ruined buildings, and broken highways fall into the edge of nowhere. A mechanised threat known as “Arc” searches the landscape looking for humans to murder. 

You are a raider who leaves the safety of the underground city of Speranza to loot the surface world for supplies to trade, repair, craft, and improve gear. 

The surface world has a desolate beauty. Vegetation has taken hold and reclaimed the land, with patches of green growing among the sand. Other than the searchlights from killer drones, there’s only natural light here, the sun bleeding through cracks in the blinds of building husks and leaving a heat shimmer on the horizon. 

By night, you can only see by torch and flame, as stars fill the sky and lasers probe the landscape looking for creatures to eliminate. Indoors, it’s pure darkness if there are no windows, unless you light the place up with torchlight and risk revealing yourself to other teams of players competing against you for the loot in squads of up to three. 

Quests send you into named locations for specific items to bring back to base, so you always go into a mission with some goal in mind, the complexity of those goals increasing as you make progress with your kitbashed guns and jury-rigged gear. Everything you bring back makes you stronger, but you also progress with XP, allowing you to increase your stamina, climb faster, and unlock various other perks across three separate skill trees – Survival, Mobility, and Conditioning. Die on a mission, and everything you took with you, minus anything in your safe pockets, is gone forever. 

What really sets the game apart from other extraction shooters, though, is the movement and the AI enemies. Arc Raiders plays from a third-person perspective and feels like what I’d imagine The Last of Us: Factions would have been like if Naughty Dog didn’t cancel it. 

Smooth, reactive animations and character control combine with an agile moveset to give you an unprecedented level of control in a game like this. Crouch down as you run down a dune, and you’ll slide Apex Legends-style to the bottom, building up speed as you go. You’re also able to mantle over waist-high walls and climb anything you can reach with a jump. Jump from rooftop to rooftop, and you can even save yourself with a last-minute ledge grab. Then there are ziplines to travel both vertically and horizontally, but you’ll fall off if you bump into another player. The developers have taken every bit of cool movement tech from other great games and added a few more. It feels slick. 

Arc Raiders also looks at Hunt: Showdown for inspiration, taking note of how it uses audio to give players information. Flocks of birds get startled by noise, flying into the air and giving away your position. When a human player dies, they send up a flare, alerting everyone to the fight (and I believe there are ways to fake this, but I didn’t come across them in my session). Some buildings even have security systems like cameras and turrets you have to deal with either stealthily or aggressively, depending on how much time you have left to escape. When you do escape, you have to activate a bunker, which spins up and whirs, blaring an alarm to alert everyone to your position. 

Its approach to AI enemies marks it out from other extraction shooters. Sure, most of the drones are easy enough to deal with, but wait until you’re pinned down by a giant robot spider that shrugs off your bullets like a gorilla reacting to a toddler punching it… underwater. Of course, these machines have their weak points, but it’s going to take some time to learn them, and it’ll take a coordinated effort from a team to bring down some of the bigger murderbots, some of which are comparable to raid bosses in an MMO. It’s as if Hunt: Showdown’s boss enemies freely roamed the world and inserted themselves into player conflicts. 

It’d be easy to make these enemies unsatisfying to fight, with them being so tanky, but that’s not the case. You feel every bullet, thanks to strong visual and audio design, with bullets pinging and ricocheting off metal husks, and parts detaching from robotic enemies. Everything feels solid and tactile, and the time-to-kill on human enemies is perfectly pitched. 

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Arc Raiders since I finished playing it last week. It occupies the perfect sweet spot between accessibility and the masochism of Tarkov. It borrows from other games but doesn’t feel at all derivative. It has style and personality. It looks and sounds incredible. Every single fight creates a lasting memory. It’s primed to be the next big thing.

You can sign up for the Arc Raiders tech test now, which kicks off tomorrow on PC, PS5, and Xbox.