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I’ve got an Arc Raiders confession to make. Last night, I died to Wasps — those little floaty drones with four thrusters, a weak machine gun, and a nasty little taser — several times in a row. You don’t really respect Wasps at first; they look like mechanical mosquitoes, bumbling around and shooting ineffectually. But in a crowd, the way they dip and dart on their thrusters makes them a real menace. And that taser shot? It’ll ruin your day.
I respect them now. The ARC machines terrorizing the player-controlled raiders topside are no joke. When I first heard Arc Raiders described as an extraction shooter, I did what any loot goblin would — geared up to make someone else’s night miserable and steal their haul. Turns out, that’s not what this game’s about at all. The robots are the real threat, and if you don’t treat them like it, they’ll leave you bleeding out in the dirt.
Not that Arc Raiders actually has any blood, mind.
Wiry innards
The more time I spend with Arc Raiders, the more I realise it’s less about shooting things and more about surviving them. Every encounter feels like it could spin out of control at any moment. One minute you’re scavenging in peace, the next you’re ducking behind a rusted car as a giant mech drops out of orbit and starts painting the ground with mortar fire. You can’t plan these moments — they just happen, and that unpredictability is what makes them brilliant.
The focus on these godless killing machines means Arc Raiders is very likely going to become the extraction shooter that breaks through into the mainstream – which even Arena Breakout: Infinite and my beloved Escape From Tarkov have failed to do – and the reason for that is that Arc Raiders no longer really feels like a PvP game with a few AI NPCs in for good measure. The ARC are the main event, and shifting that focus away makes for a much richer game both in terms of the experiences you'll find but also because it means PvP isn't the priority, so you're unlikely as a new player to spend your entire time getting reamed by megachads who have more time to play the game than you do.
The combat has this wonderful sense of chaos to it, where everything feels a little too physical, a little too real. Fights aren’t tidy. They’re scrappy and improvised, with your squad scrambling to find cover or a clean angle before something explodes. The game’s physics do a lot of the heavy lifting here — enemies topple, limbs shear off, debris goes flying — but what really sells it is how reactive the robots are. They don’t just stand still and take it. They flinch, retreat, readjust. You get this strange illusion that they’re learning, even though they’re just running clever routines. Blast a thruster off one of the flying enemies and it'll start bouncing around making it that much harder to hit, even as its own aim remains true.
I realized the effect this has on combat when a giant robot spider crashed into the middle of a fight I was having with a duo of players who had moments earlier been gunning for my blood. Retreating into the same building, we quickly agreed via the medium of emotes and voice chat that it wasn't worth wasting our sparse resources on each other when Mr Spider (important to show the ARCs respect) was crashing around outside. We snuck out through separate windows, both deciding discretion was the best way to extract with our prickly pears.
I don't know if Arc Raiders has the juice long-term. I've played 6000 hours of Escape From Tarkov and I've found it's the human cunning at the heart of it, the feel that you're hunting intelligent beings, that keeps me invested long term. Arc Raiders doesn't really have that, but what it has instead is that the texture of your interactions with human players is different, like something out of an apocalypse movie. Sure, some people will open fire on you immediately, but more often than not these interactions are faltering and confusing as you and the other people involved all try to get a handle on what people's motives actually are.
Last week I was shot down a corridor by a husband and wife team. When I threw a grenade back and used voice chat to tell them my team was coming to back me up, a man's voice told me that he was sorry, he was just trying to complete a task for doing heavy damage to raiders. A woman's voice cut in, apologizing for her idiot husband and telling me they were going to run away in the other direction and that they were sorry.
Even when you're not fighting for your life, Arc Raiders has a rhythm that keeps you tense. You’re always scanning the horizon, listening for the hum of engines or the faint whistle of incoming fire. There’s a feeling that the world itself is out to get you, that you’re this tiny, defiant speck holding out against impossible odds.
That’s perhaps why I can’t stop playing. Arc Raiders doesn’t flatter you. It doesn’t hand you easy victories or tidy set-pieces. It throws you into chaos and asks if you can make something meaningful out of it. When you do, when you survive by the skin of your teeth and limp away with a handful of scrap. In the 15-20 minute raids that make up Arc Raiders, you'll be repeatedly humbled by the ARC, but this also offers up a fantasy that no other extraction shooter can really offer.
So yeah, I died to Wasps. I’ll probably die to them again. But I'll get over it, because few games make failure feel this alive, every defeat a story worth telling.
