I knew I loved ARC Raiders when it made me so mad that I nearly sent my controller pinwheeling across the room.
I had just finished a 20-minute stint on the surface and my backpack was loaded with valuable gear. I had narrowly survived a run-in with a Hornet, a small flying robot with a machine gun on its undercarriage, and had barely made it back to an extraction point in a subway station, my health low and shields depleted. I called for a train to take me home and waited tensely for it to arrive.
Then another Raider shot me in the back.
ARC Raiders, which takes place in a post-apocalyptic future after a Terminator-style singularity has driven civilisation underground, has been a surprising success story.
Effusive word of mouth has helped its concurrent player counts surge past those of Battlefield 6, an established franchise.
The dangerous scavenging expeditions in ARC Raiders form an addictive, nerve-wracking gameplay loop. Resources are scarce, and humans rely on a group of mercantile scavengers, known as Raiders, to scour the surface for supplies. They search sprawling urban ruins for scrap metal, old computer parts and other useful junk while carefully avoiding the attention of robots, known as ARCs, that are programmed to eliminate people on sight.
As in other extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov, sessions end only when you are safely retrieved from the environment, a fraught, time-consuming process. You have to survive not only the killer robots but other raiders, who may or may not be friendly.
What makes extraction shooters so intense is that they are painfully unforgiving. As in Souls-like games such as Elden Ring or Bloodborne, death has extreme consequences, stripping you of the loot you’ve collected and any weapons and equipment you brought on the trek. In other words, the more time you spend on the surface and the more treasure you collect, the more urgent the need to make it home alive. It is a high-stakes setup that can be exquisitely stressful.
ARC Raiders by Embark Studios, which created the first-person shooter The Finals, makes important tweaks to the formula.
The first is that the ARCs themselves are incredibly challenging. They range in size from the small, unarmoured Ticks that patrol abandoned buildings and leap out of shadows to huge, car-size Bastions and Bombardiers, which are durable and heavily armed. But even more run-of-the-mill ARCs such as the drone-like Wasps and Hornets require quick thinking or careful planning. Encountering even a single ARC in the open, without adequate cover, can be deadly. Your guns are slow; theirs are fast. This is not a game that rewards mindless looting and shooting.
The difficulty encourages — indeed practically demands — teamwork. You can play with up to three friends or join a team of strangers on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X | S or PC, or you can simply partner with Raiders you come across in the wild.
Those organic encounters are often the most compelling aspect of an expedition. ARC Raiders greatly incentivises collaboration and makes it easy to signal to strangers that you want to team up, including proximity-based voice chat and a quick-use command wheel for nonverbal communication.
On the other hand, if you kill another Raider, you get all their stuff. And sometimes other Raiders have really, really good stuff.
The temptation to stab a potential collaborator in the back is strong. And because this temptation goes both ways, every chance encounter has a frisson of uncertainty and mistrust.
With powerful ARCs roaming the landscape, it seems only sensible that the few surviving members of the human race would band together and unite against their common enemy, sharing in the loot and increasing the long odds. But ARC Raiders quite brilliantly reveals the fallacy at the heart of this assumption. Faced with the choice of whether to work together with your fellow man or kill him
and rob him blind, many players will give in to their base instincts.
You can pretend to be friendly and then shoot someone whose guard is down. You can even team
up with a stranger, go looting together, and then kill that person seconds before extraction — a lesson learned from repeated experience. That instant when it dawns on you that your newfound friend is about to betray you is both devastating and delicious.
And when you run into an armed Raider and you both hesitate to shoot, and then at the same moment, through some unspoken sense of fraternity, you decide to trust?
A precious glimpse of humanity, shining through the robot-dominated wasteland.
Calum Marsh/NYTNS