It’s often best to quit while you’re ahead, to figure out when you’ve had enough and that it’s time to go home. The problem in ARC Raiders is that heading home sets off a loud klaxon that alerts nearby robots and other people to the fact that someone is leaving, and they probably want your stuff. Or maybe they just want to get home as well? You never quite know who’s going to round the corner, and whether they’ll be professing a desire to make it out together, to come all guns blazing… or maybe even both.
Extraction shooters, survival games and battle royales have spent the better part of the last decade with a bit of a rough and tumble reputation. Some of the biggest examples of each have sprung up from next to nowhere, with their roots in the modding community or indie development, and they’ve all left the major publishers completely confounded for how to try and adapt them into their own money-making machines.
Of the three, it’s extraction shooters that I feel have had the toughest time to be adapted. Battle royales are easy – it’s just last player standing – while survival games often have both co-op and PvP servers to let you get the experience you want, but the core nature of an extraction shooter, where you can lose not only what you’ve just gathered, but also what you actually brought with you on this excursion, is a particularly tricky concept to balance. Certainly it’s one that I’ve found difficult to psyche myself up for. The stakes feel so much higher, the possibility of failure just seconds away, and with little to no recourse.
Playing ARC Raiders for a few hours in a pre-release preview, and during the Server Slam test before then, the game does a good job of getting you into the flow of the game and skirting around the cost of failure. After working through the tutorial where you character is ambushed, robbed, but then makes it to an elevator with a kindly operator, you’re then handed your first mission as a Raider. The goal is simple, to head back to the surface, do some light scavenging and then get back home. ARC Raiders tracks that goal – to rummage through three potential loot containers – whether you make it back home or not, so you’re still rewarded even if you bumble into another player or get overwhelmed by ARC robots.
Those robots come in many shapes and sizes, from the small spider-like Ticks that want to show you their best Alien Facehugger impression, through the Snitch that scans for activity and can call in reinforcements if not taken down quickly enough, and up to the more formidable Bombardier drone and the imposing Queen. You’ll do well to avoid too much trouble that engaging them can cause – blasting bots makes quite a lot of noise and can draw more unwanted attention – but they’re also a valuable source of power cells and other resource for crafting.
There’s always a chance that you’ll find something really special, and that could ordinarily bring a lot of added pressure to make it back out alive. That’s where one of ARC Raiders’ best design choices comes in, with a Safe Pocket that lets you stash something that won’t be lost if and when you die. It’s such a small thing, but if you’re after one particular component or find something of high rarity, it’s invaluable to have this.
Returning to Speranza, you’ll find a bunch of progression paths are available to you, both permanent and transient. For your character, you’re earning skill points that you can spend down three paths of a skill tree to enhance particular styles of play, whether it’s stealth, looting, or whatever. You’ll also have to start building up a set of workbenches that will let you craft the key weapons, gadgets, shield, ammo and other gear that you need for filling your loadout – a free loadout is also available for when you don’t want to risk anything… or maybe you don’t actually have anything left! You can also just visit the traders of the town, who will both sell you gear and have some quests for you to follow. The best guy of all, though, is Scrappy the rooster. He’s such a random buddy, but one that will scrounge up a plethora of items and resources for you to use. You can even train him up and get him some quirky cosmetics.
There’s a wealth of gear and options to explore, and I really only managed to scratch the surface, even with a generous batch of high-end kit in the test session. Lure grenades can be very useful to draw ARCs away from you (or to bait into rival teams perhaps), but then there’s also mines, door blockers, flares and glow sticks, grapple hooks and others. A lot of what you can carry is defined but the Augment that you hold, which helps lean you into a particular direction by boosting the inventory in different ways. They can enable using heavier shields (which come at a movement speed cost), give you more quick access inventory slots, even more safe pocket slots.
One of the more special things about ARC Raiders is the choice of scenery. Instead of taking players to somewhere real or fictional in Eastern Europe or the Pacific Northwest, ARC Raiders instead heads to Italy and the underground city of Speranza where humanity has taken refuge from the ARC robots that make the surface uninhabitable. There’s all the traits of a post-apocalypse, with the regions having been reclaimed by nature, with busted cars and rusting infrastructure, but Embark has done a great job of capturing what you’d imagine this region to look and feel like, as the maps shift ever northward through Italy. Layer the kind of grimy, lived in retro-futuristic tech and fashion that still make the original Star Wars trilogy so iconic, and there’s an oddly optimistic tone to this game.
But… is ARC Raiders actually fun to play? Well, that kind of depends. Across maybe a dozen or so efforts, I managed to extract just a couple times when playing in squads, one time playing it very cautiously to avoid contact with a group that we saw attacking ARC robots a whole bunch, before they ended up coming to the extraction point we triggered and speaking in proximity chat to avoid a final fight. They were good eggs and after effectively teaming up again on the next mission, it was quite saddening that we were blasted from what felt like miles away while trekking up a hill. That was the overriding experience that I had, of being outclassed in combat whenever it struck, and as the rounds rapidly drained my resources, I’m left wondering what the final game will be like.
This was, of course, not a representative experience in that the player pool was so much smaller, the power and skill balance largely fixed. I’d hope and expect that the full game with a much larger community has more variety of approaches, more space for impromptu collaboration and messing around. We’ll no doubt see this manifest quickly after the game’s launch this week.
What feels clear to me, though, is that ARC Raiders has the potential to quickly become the biggest and best example of the extraction shooter out there. The distinct tone and feel of the world that Embark Studio has created, the feel of the action, the layered progression and systems to try and make failure not feel so final, all builds to what could be this genre’s new gold standard.
