ARC Raiders is Shaping Up to Be a Special Extraction…

Following the massive success of games like Escape From Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown, the extraction shooter is quickly becoming the subgenre of choice for new and exciting shooting games coming down the pike. Along with Bungie's Marathon, ARC Raiders is one of a small handful of high-profile new entries into the extraction shooter subgenre from a team with a strong pedigree. ARC Raiders comes from Embark Studios, whose founders are longtime veterans from Electronic Arts and DICE with plenty of credits on the Battlefield series to their name, and has already proven itself adept at leveraging new technology to craft unique shooter experiences with the critically acclaimed The Finals. Our hands-on experience with ARC Raiders indicates that the studio may be capturing lightning in a bottle a second time.

Ahead of ARC Raiders' upcoming public playtest, The Best War Games went hands-on with an extended preview of the game, where we played through the opening tutorial, three different maps, and both solo and squad-based modes. While it's clear that ARC Raiders still has a ways to go in its development before it's ready for widespread release, what was on offer during the hands-on preview illustrated that the pieces are in place for ARC Raiders to be an extraction shooter that taps into precisely what fans of the growing subgenre love about it. And with a fairly complex and robust crafting system and in-game economy, ARC Raiders almost blurs the lines between a PvPvE extraction shooter and a sandbox survival game.

second public tech test for arc raiders from April 30 until May 4 across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S

ARC Raiders Announces Second Public Tech Test Start Date and Time

Embark Studios announces the start date and time for the second public tech test of its upcoming PvPvE sandbox extraction shooter ARC Raiders.

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By José V. Rossi

ARC Raiders' Pulpy Sci-Fi Setting and Atmosphere Give It a Unique Visual Identity

Taking place in a distant future, post-apocalyptic version of Earth, ARC Raiders drops players directly into a hostile world teeming with threats both human and non-human. The titular ARC is a race of machines that ruthlessly patrol the surface of the planet while humanity has retreated to underground cities. But the valuable technology and resources on the surface are essential to humanity's continued survival, pushing a group of scavengers known as "Raiders" to make regular expeditions to the surface in hopes of attaining a better life below. Of course, the limited nature of these resources inspires competition among Raiders, and it's just as likely that a fellow Raider will shoot you in the back and steal your loot as it is that they'll cooperate with you in fights against the ARC.

Supporting this somewhat bleak futuristic outlook in ARC Raiders' story and setting is a distinctively pulpy sci-fi art direction that helps to give the game a unique visual identity. On the surface, the once glistening cities of mankind are rife with retrofuturist technology that would be right at home in the approximations of progress from 1970s and 1980s sci-fi cinema like Ridley Scott's Alien or Blade Runner. Below, the last remaining bastions of humanity are ramshackle settlements that recycle the advanced technology above to piece together crude implements for survival, like kit-bashed weaponry and gadgets to make each trek to the surface that much more rewarding.

The Finals proved that Embark Studios could take a familiar shooter experience and elevate it through distinctive and unique art direction and visual style, and it's done it once again with ARC Raiders. The title's visual motifs immediately call to mind the covers of pulp sci-fi novels and magazines or the classic, forward-thinking science fiction from before the fall of the Iron Curtain. But the ARC themselves are more akin to how humanity's machine overlords were depicted in James Cameron's Terminator films, and they're far from the only threats that players have to deal with in ARC Raiders' dangerous jaunts to the surface.

PvP Dominates the PvPvE Equation in ARC Raiders

In terms of its gameplay loop, ARC Raiders will feel right at home to anyone familiar with the extraction shooter subgenre. Whether playing solo or in a squad, players will begin in their hub area — the underground city in which humanity fights for its continued survival — preparing for a mission by crafting supplies, upgrading skills, configuring loadouts, and taking on missions for the various inhabitants below. Once ready to depart for the surface, you'll select a location on the map and deploy via the "Tubes", a network of pneumatic highways that connect humanity's last city to the surface. You'll scavenge for supplies, fight enemies, and then return underground via freight elevators that gradually seal off throughout a strict 30-minute time limit. The longer you remain on the surface, the greater potential for danger is balanced with the opportunity for better loot, and navigating that sense of risk vs. Reward is key to how you'll progress in ARC Raiders.

Similar to Hunt: Showdown, sound design and noise play a critical role in how successful you are during a trip to the surface, as everything you do can make noise that draws unwanted attention. The ARC come in a wide variety of forms — from flying surveillance and attack drones to mobile flamethrowers, sentry turrets, giant quadrupedal tanks, and more — but they're far from your greatest worry when it comes to making noise. Joining you on the surface at any time are plenty of other fellow Raiders, and just about everything you do, from searching containers to firing a weapon, gives away your position. From our hands-on time with the current build of the game, it was the human threats that posed the greatest danger, rather than the PvE side of ARC Raiders' PvPvE combat.

The ARC are relatively easy to take down, rarely travel in groups, and can mostly be avoided with some careful use of stealth and precision. Human enemies, on the other hand, are a wild card. Happening upon another Raider when playing either solo or in a squad presents a potentially fatal coin toss. There's the option to trust other Raiders and simply go about your business of looting and shooting robots, but more often than not, other Raiders will just shoot on sight, robbing you not just of everything you've looted in your current expedition but potentially all the gear you've accumulated for your loadout up to that point. Thankfully, ARC Raiders' in-game economy and crafting systems mean a new loadout is never more than a trip to the hub area away.

ARC Raiders' Crafting and Economy Show Plenty of Promise for Different Classes or Builds

In addition to being a PvPvE extraction shooter, ARC Raiders has a fair amount of sandbox survival systems and mechanics at play. Resource collecting and crafting are at the heart of the game's progression loop, with each excursion to the hostile surface presenting an opportunity for increasingly valuable rewards that improve survivability in more dangerous areas bursting with even more valuable loot, and so on. In its current state, ARC Raiders is very generous with the amount of resources needed to craft a basic weapon, ammunition, or shield, which allows you to jump right back in the action even after getting unceremoniously killed and having your entire kit stolen.

The collecting and crafting systems are further bolstered by ARC Raiders' merchants and skill tree. While only some of the merchants had available wares during the preview, their best items were priced in such a way that it typically only required recycling one or two rare components to have the credits necessary for purchase. Loot collected on the surface comes in color-coded rarity tiers, and the highest, most valuable tiers of loot pack a lot of value into a single item, not to mention a full stack. Similarly, just about everything you do on the surface in ARC Raiders rewards experience that accumulates into Skill Points that can be spent in a very robust, branching skill tree. The different branches available — Mobility, Conditioning, and Survival — each correlate to a different playstyle that, in theory, could see squads coming together with collective strengths that synergize and make up for individual weaknesses or blind spots.

Our first several excursions in ARC Raiders were mostly geared toward playing it safe and collecting resources before quickly retreating back underground. But after accumulating enough supplies for significant upgrades to our loadout and putting some points into the skill tree, each subsequent trip to ARC Raiders' inhospitable world felt that much more exciting, paving the way for the confidence to take down competing Raiders and trying to go one-on-one with some of the more fearsome ARC threats. That confidence was only boosted after getting the chance to play in a squad and seeing how we were able to each fulfill a specific team role and get some substantial gains. That is, until it all came tumbling down at the hands of a better-equipped squad, who used coordination and positioning to pick us off from a distance and reap the rewards.

What Comes Next for ARC Raiders

Ahead of ARC Raiders' public Tech Test 2 on April 30, the game is already shaping up to be an experience that taps into the best elements of both sandbox survival games and extraction shooters. The drive to keep pushing for greater rewards and the associated thrill of the risk in seeking them out never stopped being fun during our 3 hours with the game. Playing solo was a tense, isolated experience that did a great job of making you feel that you were a lone survivor stacked up against impossible odds, but it also presented some very quick and unfruitful sessions at first when getting your kit together. Conversely, playing in a squad felt like an area where ARC Raiders is potentially going to shine brightest, especially when working together with a team that uses careful tactics and strategy aided by voice chat.

From a technical standpoint, ARC Raiders looks and runs well, and the game is already incredibly polished in a way that fans of Embark Studios' The Finals would expect. With the valuable feedback from the public Tech Test 2 and some more tweaks to the game's balance, ARC Raiders could be one of the most exciting and promising shooters to release this year, and its progression loop and item economy are already in place for its survival and crafting elements to work toward drawing in players that might otherwise avoid the tense and difficult nature of an extraction shooter.

ARC Raiders is currently in development for PC with an open alpha playtest starting April 30, 2025.

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