Arc Raiders review

You can always spot a top-tier shooter by the devil in the details. Arc Raiders feels so thoughtfully handcrafted that it makes recent CoD maps feel like they were churned out by a bored AI. It's got a retro-modern aesthetic that feels cohesive. Whether it’s the five different maps that each look and feel completely different from each other or the plethora of materials to gather, Arc Raiders makes you think of your next run even before you’ve finished the first. You’re constantly thinking of ways to complete mission objectives while also searching for the right materials for the next upgrades.

The game refuses to hand you anything on a silver platter, you have to use your eyes. Need meds or a toaster? Raid a clinic or a kitchen. After technological bits? Head to the industrial zones. It’s a harsh lesson in geography that you’re forced to learn every time you leave the underground bunker to face the robot-infested surface.

Arc Raider’s story is also intriguing. Robots have taken over the surface of the Earth and humans are pushed to the underground. You are one of the many raiders that must take frequent trips to the surface for materials and to bolster humanity’s chance against the Arcs. It’s simple, yes but it gets more intriguing as you play because the Arcs are genuinely dangerous and you’re probably as helpless as a leaf in a hurricane if you’re not bringing the right tools for the job.

At its core, Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter but there are so many layers to this game. If you’ve played Ubisoft’s The Division, you might be familiar with the Dark Zone in that game which was an extraction shooter mode. The concept is same and simple, you get in, run around finding loot and leave. Any enemy and player encounter in the game can end in two ways, peaceful or violent. If you die, you lose everything you’ve looted and all the stuff you came with too. If you kill another player, you can take their entire loot.

In Arc Raiders, you’re either going to the surface alone or, with one or two other friends as a party. Your goal is to complete objectives given to you by the traders in the game while simultaneously looking for the loot that is required for upgrading your workshop.

Each run is completely different depending on your interactions with the other players and the machines that are flying around trying to hunt any living thing. Proximity chat makes this even more fun where you can scream ‘friendly’ hoping the player on the other side doesn’t pull the trigger (before you do). While that’s not a guarantee for cooperation, the community is quickly learning to balance temporary alliances and violent villainy. I have always found random players to be doing their own thing if they’re not interested in teaming up in-game or they outright start shooting. However, there were moments where we exchanged a few words with strangers, but the fact that anyone can kill you at any time never leaves your mind. You’re constantly assessing the pros and cons before pulling the trigger at that very moment. It’s in these moments where either party decides to shoot or stay friendly that builds tension and keeps everyone on the edge.

Cooperation isn’t forced but it’s sometimes necessary because some of the bigger Arc enemies are incredibly difficult to kill and they can destroy your health and shields in just a single blast. Hence players on the servers are usually either asking for help if they want to take down an Arc or they’re simply minding their own business and looking for loot.

The AI of these Arc enemies is merciless and it always makes you feel like you’re at a disadvantage but without feeling unfair. The smaller drones can either quickly gang up on you or make enough noise to attract other players looking to savage your loot or worse, attract the bigger and tougher enemy Arcs like the Leaper and the Bombardier. 

So whether you’re looking to jump in for some specific loot or objective or to simply wreak havoc, the Arc enemies will always make you feel like you’re putting your hand in a tank full of piranhas.

The game also has one of the best sound designs of any game I have played this year. It competes with Battlefield 6 in terms of sound design and that game sells you the feeling of a warzone like nothing else. Arc Raiders has this tactile and crisp audio design that makes every gunshot and every Arc enemy feel distinctly different and separate from the other. Even the animations of some of these drones are beautiful! Shooting one of the four propellers of a Wasp drone pushes it out of balance and you can watch the thing spiral out of control while trying to shoot you at the same time. It’s funny and also a massively impressive technical achievement on the game developer’s part. Guns also shoot with a satisfying recoil and bullets dink into metal drones with a satisfying sound that is hard to describe in words. You have to play it to truly understand how good these little details are.

Graphically, it’s really stable, in fact more stable than Battlefield 6 in terms of server and ping. We played it on our test bench Nvidia RTX 5090 and it ran buttery smooth at 4K resolution with Epic graphic settings. We got around 80FPS average with DLAA, which is Nvidia’s anti-aliasing at native resolution. However with DLSS on Quality, the frame rate shot to a much better 120FPS average without any noticeable degradation in the graphic quality. The new Transformer model for AI upscaling here from Nvidia is quite phenomenal at achieving higher FPS without graphical degradation.

Arc Raiders is easily one of my favourite games of this year. The extraction shooter genre is not new but the way Arc Raiders balances gameplay with PvP and PvE elements is absolutely perfect. I wasn’t expecting much here but this game surprised me in the best way possible.

The anxiety of losing your good gear in one bad run amps up the tension between players and the looming threat from Arcs that are constantly searching for you around the map adds to it. It’s also peppered with a lot of detail and things to do in between the runs. Material crafting and inventory management is sort of necessary to have a good run, while you also have to understand that workbenches need to be upgraded quickly to craft better loot. It’s simply one of the best extraction shooters you can play and only time will tell how the game progresses in the future if more content gets added.