I’m not that keen on extraction games like Arc Raiders. The last two I played at length were Tom Clancy’s The Division (specifically its Survival mode), which features possibly my favourite videogame piles of trash, and Hunt: Showdown, which features possibly my favourite (i.e. the absolute worst) videogame spider. I just don’t see the point of a loot commute, even with other players around to add spice. Still, I do think I’ll spend more time in Arc – out now on Steam, EGS and the Microsoft Store – after losing a few hours to a pre-release multiplayer session last week. Amongst other things, it has an enticing buried city and a neat sliding mechanic.
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I was lured initially by the game’s dusty, rainbow-edged equipment aesthetics and decor, which appear to blend influences from Star Wars cantinas and Simon Stalenhag’s landscape art. The map list includes a vaguely Aztec spaceport, with huge sloping bunkers and pieces of fuselage all over, and a crumbling dam environment that make me think of the Gates of Boletaria.
When I started playing, I was intent on enjoying the art direction, and scornful of efforts to engage me in combat over scavengeable gun components. Beginning a solo raid, I promptly holstered my rifle, hoping that this would be perceived as a sign of pacifism – I hadn’t yet realised that holstering your gun speeds up movement, making it a viable offensive gesture – and set about combing through cavernous hangars and lobbies decorated with bronze plaques and statues.
Such opulent detritus. Such history. Thank goodness none of this is AI-generated. A group of players ran in while I was cooing over the displays in mission control, and I glanced at them pityingly while they shot me in the head. Fools! You are playing the game wrong. Look at all these rusting kernels of rocket. Look at these awesome, boxy computers. Please save your bullets for the mecha-vultures outside. There are archaeological delights enough here for all of us.
After a few minutes of this, a PR ruined everything by asking if some other journalists could squad up with me. I grudgingly assented to becoming part of a three-person team, and was pleased to discover that Arc Raiders can be quite absorbing even when you don’t insist on playing it like a goddamn museum.
We spent a few more rounds on the spaceport, learning such valuable lessons as “when you shoot a gun, people can hear it a long way away” and “if you’re taking cheeky potshots at other players inside buildings, best don’t do it while you’re being flanked by drones”. I experienced emotions broadly familiar from other extraction games: wariness of any distant sound or disturbance; fear of skylines and open ground; reluctant enthusiasm for collectible scrap; exasperation at the filling of my inventory; suspicion about any players who profess to be friendly; anxiety about making it to elevator extraction points, which treacherously seal themselves off at intervals.
But then we transferred to the Buried City map, and Arc Raiders began to feel more like its own thing. The map consists of densely clustered multiple-storey buildings, ranging from elegant Old Town areas to square apartment blocks, all of them jutting from a sea of sand. The sand dunes shape this blocky urban layout into an atmospheric playground of sweeping slopes, partly obscured entrances, and undulating cover. Wonderful stuff.
During our initial foray, we broke into one of the apartment blocks and roved from floor to floor, tip-toeing across bridges of beaten metal and riding ziplines up the elevator shaft. I shot an old piano with a silenced pistol, to see if it sounded like a piano (it did). We found a locked safe in one room, and set off in search of a supervisor’s office that might harbour the key.
Then we were ambushed by a sniper on a nearby tower, got set on fire by some pesky rollerbots, and fled deeper into the city. It was at this point that I fell in love with the game’s bum-sliding, which appears to have no hard limit as long as you’re travelling downhill, and is dangerously addictive in a world of dunes.
Sometimes you use the slide to get out of trouble, like a spider evading a parasitic wasp. Sometimes, the slide gets you into trouble. We spent the second half of that initial Buried City expedition tobogganing through alleyways and aggroing successive flocks of drones. By the end, we were all pecked to pieces and scattered over tiled roofs and balconies, short of ammo and with barely any time to reach the nearest elevator.
If you’re unconvinced by extraction games, I’m not sure anything I’ve written above is reason to buy Arc Raiders. The core of it is still grabbing loot, so that you can restore and enhance your gear, so that you can grab more loot and shoot the other guys before they grab your loot, etcetera etcetera until the heat death of the universe.
The shooting is sharp, in fairness – kind of like The Division but without all the damage numeral cruft and with a lot more verticality and scrambling. The spindly, DIY firearms have a gratifying heft and clickiness, and the larger robot enemies are spongier than a boatful of blubber, often obliging you to carry out a coordinated retreat towards the nearest elevator. We experimented with just sliding away from one of the bulkier fliers, and it did not go well.
Still, I feel like I’ve broadly seen it all before. I’m hoping I’ll have a few more transformative moments like that initial slither through the Buried City. Much will depend on whether unlocking skills and new weapon recipes meaningfully changes how you play, and whether the spaces retain their mystique once you’ve settled into a rhythm of farming them for parts. If you’re persuaded by all this sexy talk of bumsliding, scroll your merry way back up to those store links. We’ll have a proper review in due course.
