Arc Raiders review: "The most memorable multiplayer experiences I've had all year – this shooter is tense but wonderfully approachable"

Arc Raiders made me feel actual shame. Let me explain why I mean that as a compliment. I had spawned in the Buried City, one of the four beautifully sprawling, post-apocalyptic maps that Arc Raiders launches with. Outside, sand is piled high against the decaying remains of apartment buildings, libraries, and weatherworn car parks. The skies are filled with flying ARC drones that relentlessly patrol key thoroughfares, attacking any humans they encounter with shock weapons and machine guns. The plazas and squares, meanwhile, are home to stomping robotic behemoths, capable of mowing down entire squads in a hail of bullets.

Me, I'm tucked away indoors, a squad of one rifling through desk drawers, cupboards, and crannies in search of crafting materials. So far, my pack contains nothing more valuable than a few dusty seed packets and tattered rolls of duct tape. Things start to look up, however, when an unassuming nightstand rewards me with a weapon blueprint. My excitement grows when a cobwebby wardrobe gives up an epic grenade. And I audibly gasp when I open a discarded bag to find a legendary weapon attachment. Life is good. All I need to do is make it to the extraction point past those fearsome ARC robots and my fellow player-controlled raiders without getting mulched by either.

Then: footsteps. I freeze, straining my ears to make sure I'm not imagining it. At moments like this, you become aware of just how effective Arc Raiders' sound design is at delivering audio that grounds you in the physical spaces you're exploring. I can hear the wind howling outdoors and even pick out the occasional creaks and groans of the tumbledown building I'm standing in. I'm about to allow myself a sigh of relief when I hear the ominous, unmistakable sound of a weapon being reloaded.

I unmute my mic and call uncertainly into the dark. "Hi there… You friendly?" A menacing silence is all that greets me. And then, more footsteps, moving closer. Really close now. I ready my shotgun.

30 seconds later, my would-be assailant is crawling on the floor, downed – and it seems that he's finally plugged in his mic. "What the hell is wrong with you?" he shouts. He's so upset that I hesitate to finish him off. Suddenly, I hear more footsteps. It's two more solo players who've evidently formed an impromptu team. "Hey, did that guy shoot you?" one of them calls out to the downed man. I can hear the disbelief in his voice. He's genuinely appalled that one solo raider would do this to another. Yet another raider arrives. "What's going on?" they call.

Red-faced, I unmute again and mutter something about this all being a terrible misunderstanding, but I'm already sprinting for the window. I didn't even get to loot the guy's body.

Shameful as the encounter was, it highlights so many of Arc Raiders' strengths: the palpable tension of its looting experience, the deeply immersive sound design, the crisp third-person gunplay. And the emergent player-to-player dynamics too. You might have heard Arc Raiders described as an extraction shooter – sometimes, you could just as reasonably describe it as a social experiment.

Hooked on a feeling

What Arc Raiders does share in common with other extraction shooters are the stakes. At the beginning of each round, you'll choose some weapons and gear from your stash to take into the fray with you. Once you spawn into a raid – either as a solo player, a duo, or a squad of three – you'll be stuffing your pockets with whatever valuables you can find. Extract safely and you'll return to your underground homebase of Speranza with everything you found: armfuls of gear and materials that you can craft into new weapons, attachments, shields, and a variety of unorthodox explosives.

But if you die, you'll lose everything – not just the loot you've gathered topside, but anything you brought into the match with you. Your favourite SMG, gone. Your stores of ammo, forget about them. Those rare grenades you thought you'd finally try out, dust on the wind.

This instils every round of Arc Raiders with a baseline amount of tension. After all, even if you came in with nothing but crappy weapons and a can-do attitude, you're very likely to find yourself in possession of more loot than you can carry after 10 minutes of raid-time. And if you find something truly precious – a crafting blueprint, say, or a legendary item – you'll be vibrating with tension by the time you call the extraction elevator and are forced to endure the agonising wait for it to arrive.

Where Arc Raiders distinguishes itself from other extraction shooters, though, is in the user-friendliness of it all. Whereas other genre stalwarts present as seething military simulations, Arc Raiders is less edgy, less hostile. One much-discussed example of this is the fact that you're given the option to join a raid using a free loadout that provides you with a random selection of basic gear.

Functionally, this serves as a safety net for those times when a run of bad games might leave your stash looking painfully depleted. But it's also indicative of an attitude towards you, the player. Arc Raiders doesn't kick you when you're down – it reaches out a hand to help you back onto your feet. "Go get 'em, champ," Arc Raiders seems to say to you, probably while tousling your hair fondly and chucking your chin. "I believe in you. I'm sorry the free gun is a bit shit."

This encouraging attitude may go some way to account for the curiously good-natured playerbase. Heading into a raid as a solo player can feel like a daunting proposition, and all but the most coldblooded will experience a minor surge of adrenaline when they hear another raider close-by. But these encounters are just as likely to develop into gunfights as they are to develop into voice-chats about where on the map to find apricots. The tension and relief is even more palpable when you're heading to an extraction site only to find a rival raider holding the doors open for you like a kindly maître d'.

Going topside as part of a two or three-person squad tends to be a much more violent experience, but you'll still find players making use of the robust emote system to suggest ceasefires and team-ups. Sure, occasionally one of these players might later hurl an explosive at you, but such betrayals are rare and their possibility ensures that a frisson of tension is always there, humming away in the back of your head.

Even the post-apocalyptic world of Arc Raiders is somehow more cheerful and upbeat than the settings of its peers. Sure, Earth's a wreck and robots are hunting you down, but hope pervades the light-touch story the game presents. Tarkov, by comparison, is so relentlessly gritty and bleak that it makes me feel like I'm being punched in the face by an upsetting newspaper headline.

Taking all comers

But to say that Arc Raiders is streamlined and approachable isn't to suggest that this is lightweight, casual fare. Take the aforementioned ARC robots, for example. New players consistently underestimate the toughness and lethality of this cast of computer-controlled robo-adversaries – there have even been calls from some quarters for Embark to tone down their difficulty a smidge. In my view, the developers would be wise to stick to their guns here, ensuring that the sudden, unexpected arrival of a Rocketeer or a Leaper remains frightening rather than pedestrian.

Because the ARC offer so much more than safe targets to gun down and loot. Perhaps most obviously, they bully raiders out of position, complicating otherwise-safe extraction sites or forcing players to give away their position by opening fire. Their visual cues – flashing amber lights when they're actively searching and red when they've spotted a raider – make them excellent early detection devices, too. In some games, I'll grab the high ground and watch the skies for the telltale red shimmer of Snitches and Wasps that have latched onto a target. Cackling to myself, I ready my rifle.

And then there's that alchemical social aspect again. In one game, I watched as five or six players all opened fire on a hulking Bastion, battering it with gunfire and grenades in a coordinated assault from a building overlooking its position. I joined in just as smoke and flames were starting to pour from the joints in the robot's crablike armour, and shamelessly took part in the celebratory looting as if I was an equal contributor to its downfall. I worried that someone would shoot me in the head, but the vibes remained impeccable. In that moment, it was easy to forget that these players were all potential enemies.

While this player-versus-player-versus-environment setup isn't unique to Arc Raiders, there's a polish and confidence about the game that will make it a tempting proposition for a broader audience than perhaps any other extraction shooter to date. This sure-footedness largely extends to the experience you'll discover back at your homebase in Speranza, too. Between raids, you'll be managing your stash and crafting ammo and equipment, as well as checking in with a cast of merchants and questgivers. To commend a game's inventory and menu design feels like damning with faint praise – like telling a friend that their socks look nice on their wedding day – but this stuff matters, given how much time you'll spend in these screens.

My only real quibble, besides the slight faff associated with splitting stacks of items, is the decision to tightly limit your stash size early on. I can see the rationale (it trains you to prioritize crafting, selling, and recycling items into parts rather than constantly hoarding), but having to repeatedly spend coins on stash-size enhancements feels artificially miserly and frankly a bit boring. In a game with so many outlandishly strange items, why am I having to spend so much currency on storage?

I have a similar nit to pick when it comes to the skill trees that let you unlock buffs and abilities in the fields of conditioning, survival, and mobility. Browsing some of these unlocks will have you salivating at the in-game possibilities: the ability to craft new items mid-match from the loot that you gather; the ability to prise open unbreachable security lockers that are packed with epic weapons; the ability to defuse mines and traps that would otherwise blast you into chunky salsa. But given how quickly your level 1 raider finds themselves wheezingly exhausted by a brisk jog, I find it hard to imagine a player who won't first sink skill point after skill point into boosting your maximum stamina. Whereas other skills invite you to dream about new playstyles, this one feels like you're solving a tedious problem.

Post-apocalyptic future?

Reviewing a multiplayer game at launch can be a bit like reviewing a puppy: they're often at their most lovable when they're new, and you can never be exactly sure what they'll grow into. For Arc Raiders, the early signs are excellent. The playerbase is currently more likely to extend olive branches than middle fingers, and the game's systems feel refreshingly respectful of your time. As the months slide by, and a subset of players push the game's skill ceiling ever higher, it will be interesting to see whether those good vibes can entirely survive.

Embark Studios seems largely committed to the sense of user friendliness that suffuses the game's launch. Whereas Arc Raiders' genre stablemates periodically employ stash-clearing progress wipes, Embark Studios is proposing a system whereby such resets will be optional. Players that participate will receive rewards if they opt in, but on paper it looks like great news for time-strapped raiders who want to hold onto their hard-earned arsenals. Less immediately promising is the cosmetics store, with a range of outfits that currently look a little more pricey and a little less customizable when compared to those offered in Embark's free-to-play offering, The Finals.

But, in the here and now, Arc Raiders is serving up the most memorable multiplayer experiences I've had all year. Its tangle of interlocking systems means that a single raid has the potential to be unbelievably eventful. Just yesterday, my squad used a lure grenade to sic a Rocketeer on a hostile trio of raiders. As we closed in for the kill, a Leaper leapt into our midst with their gangly, comedy jump, scattering us. Cheeks aching with laughter, we made it to the cover of a nearby building, only to find another battered and bruised squad already hunkered inside. They used emotes to signal that they had no hostile intent – one even patched up my shield for me.

There are many more chapters in this one raid – pitched battles, unlikely revives, botched flanking manoeuvres. By the time we're waiting on the exposed platform for the painfully slow train that will bring us back to Speranza, I am so tense I could justifiably seek medical attention. But this time, the nerves have nothing to do with the loot in my inventory. It's that none of us want the story of this raid to end in ignominious defeat.

We board the train, we hit the button to depart, and we cheer. Life is good. We go again.

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