ARC Raiders Review — Machine Raiders

It’s been a while since a multiplayer extraction shooter really grabbed my attention, with Marauders stealing a great deal of my time when it first came out. While I admit the genre can be highly addicting, with the incredible tension tied to PVP loot raiding with a real, persistent inventory, I find that the genre really needs to do something original with the setting and gameplay loop to draw in my attention. For Marauders, it was the unique dieselpunk-space aesthetic that drew me in, and the addition of a space-faring, ship-boarding element to the gameplay that kept me playing. While my Marauders phase is long since over, I took a look at ARC Raiders and decided it was certainly worth my time, seeing as the game delivered a fresh take on the genre both aesthetically and with some gameplay elements.

My synopsis of ARC Raiders after my playthrough? It’s alright, but probably not something I’ll be going back to.

Before I get more into specifics, I have to point out the blatant irony in a title that depicts a future in which humanity has been driven underground by a robotic apocalypse, having a big AI content warning on it.

The Steam page section describing AI generative content for ARC Raiders reads as follows:

“During the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.”

While that might sound scary, and it personally had me raising my eyebrows at the potential use of AI-generated content in ARC Raiders, the studio has been more forthcoming, albeit in interviews, about what this AI is. Rather than generating any art assets, this is instead a system used to actually train the brains of the NPCs within the game. Actual artificial intelligence. What this actually results in, I haven’t personally seen in any of my matches.

There has been suspicion from the community that ARC Raiders uses AI-generated voice lines. I can’t personally speak to this, but I did play the game with my ears perked up to hear any robotic voices. I’m going to have to just take the developer’s word on this one, despite the fact that they have used AI text-to-speech in the past.

As for the end product, ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter with a third-person camera perspective that sees players raiding the surface world after being driven underground by a robotic apocalypse. You fight for scraps against both other raiders and the robotic hordes, the former also being a risky gambit where you’re unsure if a stranger encountered in the wild is friendly or hostile. For me, these encounters usually ended with me being shot in the back of the head before I even saw them coming.

To be totally honest, that is how I would describe my interaction with a lot of games in the extraction shooter genre. That’s unfortunately the problem with ARC Raiders. I don’t feel as though the gameplay really justifies itself as something too different from titles like Tarkov, Marauders, or other entries in the genre. I am not enough of an expert in the genre to tell you small nuances between the gameplay, except that ARC Raiders uses a different camera perspective, and the weapon progression isn’t very exciting, with most upgrades just being tiered-up versions of guns you already have, rather than there being a wide roster of unique weapons to play around with.

It feels like the game takes baby steps to stand out in its gameplay without ever fully committing. Movement is slightly faster than, say, Tarkov, without fully committing to being a movement shooter. Time-to-kill is lengthened, but only because weapons have short magazines, with better geared players still one-tapping you. At times, it feels like it wants to be PvE, but hardly anybody wants to be a friendly stranger when the reward for killing you in cold blood is so high.

Where ARC Raiders does stand out from the other games in its genre is through its style. While I find the sort of “tacticool but dirty aesthetic” of many post-apocalyptic settings really boring, ARC Raiders does manage to create a colorful and visually interesting apocalypse that caught my interest. The style uses a lot of space-race-era designs, with cosmonaut suits and fighter helmets making a big appearance in the roster of aesthetics. The map itself is less interesting, but it ties in some elements of sci-fi doohickery that stand out from what a lot of other games are doing. On that front, I would give ARC Raiders a C or B rating; better than many, but not the best I’ve ever seen style-wise.

Unfortunately, much of this style comes at the cost of egregious cash shop prices. While there is a battle pass (yuck), many of the cosmetics you’ll find in this game are purchased for credits at half the price of the game itself. Kind of unforgivable for a game you have to pay to play, and something that really took a lot of the steam out of the title for me.

That’s all I really have to say about ARC Raiders. While the aesthetic is cool, it comes at the price of overpriced cosmetics. The gameplay, while I’m sure an expert on the genre would say otherwise, didn’t feel different enough from other titles in the genre or practically fun enough to personally keep me invested. I’m sure the game has its target audience (hence the currently overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam), but if you aren’t already a part of it, I doubt ARC Raiders will do much to entice you into a new genre.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of ARC Raiders. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! ARC Raiders is available on Steam, Epic Games, PlayStation, and Xbox.