ARC Raiders seemed destined for failure when it launched on October 30 for the PC and consoles. An extraction shooter, it was squished in between the launch dates of Battlefield 6 on October 10 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 on November 14.
But instead of failing to be discovered amid the giants, the game is thriving with more than four million copies sold to date, and its Steam concurrency is above Battlefield 6’s and Call of Duty’s at the moment. Of course, the latter games are available on other platforms, but it’s a testament to ARC Raider’s success at a time when many other extraction shooters have failed.
It is an amazing game, and if you don’t believe me, just watch the embedded YouTube video of a run recorded by my friend Mark Chandler, where we escaped in the nick of time from the ARC chasing us in the dark. And the unusual thing about it is that escaping with your life and goods is more important than racking up the kills — making it a “chill” shooter.
ARC Raiders is a sci-fi shooter from Embark Studios, a division of Nexon, with a post-apocalyptic world similar to the popular Fallout Series — albeit a much smaller world for looting and extraction. It’s a player-versus-player-versus-environment survival shooter extraction game, played from a third-person view.
A big bet on kinda triple-A games
This game has a rich history, and was started by Patrick Soderlund, founder of Embark Studios and former head of EA’s development teams and former lead of Dice, the maker of the Battlefield games. Soderlund convinced Owen Mahoney, former CEO of Nexon, to back Embark years ago. It was a big bet, though smaller than others in the past.
Mahoney had a legendary run at Nexon, which pioneered the free-to-play massively multiplayer online (MMO) business in 1994. Mahoney, a former EA veteran, helped the company go public in 2011 and reach beyond the Asian audience that it captured through popular massively multiplayer online games like Dungeon&Fighter, MapleStory and FIFA Online. Under Mahoney’s CEO reign from 2014 to 2024, Nexon’s market cap grew 5.5 times to more than $20 billion while revenues grew 2.5 times to $3.93 billion.
Mahoney left before ARC Raiders saw the light of day. Under the new CEO, Junghun Lee, the game continued toward its launch. And now it has launched. Mahoney, Soderlund and Lee all saw the value of having a small but experienced team make ARC Raiders and to launch it as the kind of small but fun game that could bring original content to triple-A audiences again. Embark, founded in 2018, tested this concept with the launch of The Finals — a game made by team of 50 — in 2023, and now it has launched its second game two years later.
This is one of the games that shows that Nexon under Lee isn’t afraid to create games based on brand-new intellectual properties. With the success of the game, it looks like Nexon has proven that its approach to new IP works.
Hands-on gameplay
I’ve been playing the game and it’s a lot of fun, as it’s a real challenge to go up to the surface world, dodge the AI enemies known as ARC, acquire loot for the survivors underground and then extract safely with your life. It’s almost more like what I wish Fallout could be — and it was made by a game studio with just 300 people. For much of the development time, the team was much smaller.
You can tell it has a small budget because it doesn’t have very many cutscenes. The cinematic start lasts a minute or so. The lore of the game is slowly revealed through exploration, environmental storytelling, and missions. The game is set in 2180 in a part of Italy, in a place called The Rust Belt. It’s not unlike the survival sandbox game Rust.
It isn’t easy to capture why this game is so appealing. There are plenty like it on the market, but this game nails the experience. It’s scary to hear the ARC enemies flying above you or stomping on the ground as they draw near. Your own weapons are underpowered, with Ferro heavy rifles having a single-shot rate of fire and taking a long time to reload.
Meanwhile, the flying ARCs like Wasps or Hornets can get off a lot more shots at you. They’re part of a menagerie of killer robots that have all but wiped out humans. And when something like a Queen approaches you on the ground like a big spider, you really just have to run. There are no fancy vehicles available for you to get around. Humanity has sunk to a low point, resorting to a life of scavenging in a world that is increasingly depleted and dominated by the ARC AI forces.
But every time you leave the subterranean haven of Speranza to go up to the surface, you have a foolish hope. That is, you have a chance to find life-changing loot. You can elude the ARCs as long as you don’t get too greedy or encumbered. And you can make it through the horribly long extraction process as you wait for elevators or trains to take you below.
Sometimes the challenge isn’t so much the ARC enemies and it’s more like the other humans in the game who will kill you. It’s a high-stakes game of exploration, as you have to survive topside, get your loot, and then try to escape. But if you are killed topside, you lose your whole loadout and whatever you found. And sometimes the humans kill you just to get your loot. That’s as high stakes as it gets. I have lost my loadouts multiple times and it taught me to go in with a Free Loadout to keep my losses lower on grab-and-go missions.
The game has a lot of depth in terms of the available maps, which include a free expansion dubbed the North Line. The new Stella Montis map invites Raiders to explore abandoned structures that remain eerily pristine compared to the wrecks of the Rust Belt. It includes a new beastly Matriarch enemy that very likely requires teams of ARC Raiders to get together to defeat a common enemy. In that way, the game deliberately encourages players to work together, rather than against each other.
The game also does not take itself so seriously. You can rely on Scrappy the chicken to loot things for you. And if you upgrade Scrappy’s bed, you can get more out of the chicken with each loot run. Yet it takes itself seriously enough because it’s not a happy time for humans.
Beautiful graphics and sound
The graphics and sound are great and are in service of the gameplay. You see bright lights from sunsets, but it’s a wounded world with abandoned and crumbling buildings. Through the use of laser lights, you can tell which way the distant ARCs are facing and creep up on them. You can see smoke in the distance that signals an ARC that has been downed and might yield some loot. And you hear the sounds that others make. You have to constantly scan the skies and mark the enemies you see for your teammates to know.
You can also muffle your own sounds by creeping, rather than walking fast. When you run, you can lose your breath, and it takes a lot of effort to get into cover when the ARCs are flying above you. As they catch up to you, you can hear them rev up and prepare to attack. The night skies are full of stars, but they’re also full of ARC enemies.
Also, if you walk by video cameras, you need to shoot them out. No one tells you to do this in the game, but if you don’t, you’ll soon have the company of ARC entities.
The game ran fine on a gaming laptop, the HP Omen 16 League of Legends Limited Edition, on a hotel Wi-Fi connection. It also looks great on my Falcon Northwest Tiki Gaming PC with an Nvidia 5090 graphics card and a 32-inch Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED 81SF.
After extraction: The loot
I tried doing short runs early on so that I could grab stuff and get out. I also teamed up with Mark to gain the protection of having more than one survivor. Your fellow squadmate can revive you if you’re downed. Sometimes, I had some cool purple loot and my own custom loadout, but lost everything by getting killed by humans or the ARC.
Once you extract from the game and return to Speranza, you can sort through your loot, which is all neatly categorized. The purple loot is the best and rarest, the blue is medium value and priced well, and the green and gray are worth the least but can be assembled into something more useful through your crafting stations. You can buy additional crafting stations, like the weapons station to add attachments to your guns. Or you can craft grenades, bandages, shield rechargers and more — all in the name of making it easier to survive Topside.
You can sell off the stuff you don’t need and spend the money on more storage space. Over time, you can upgrade your inventory so you can carry more. You can also go to dealers in the game and buy guns, ammo, and other supplies. And there are ways to drop goods and pick them up in the elevators or inside the game world.
The crafting is often as fun as finding the loot. And there are some desirable things, like the Anvil Hand Cannon, that can vastly improve your chances of survival. Mark noted that you can craft even a simple gun, the Stitcher, into a real weapon as you upgrade it to level four.
You can also improve your skills along the way. The more missions you do, the more you get skill points to spend on your skill tree for things like mobility, conditioning and survival.
On mobility, you can make it easier to sprint for a time, jump longer distances and reduce fall damage, and climb or vault faster. On conditioning, you can add points to carry more gear, speed up looting, and heal faster. And on survival, you can make your movement quieter, alert yourself to traps, or gain damage resistance when low on health.
The community in the game
What is fascinating is that the game enables its own unique culture to develop around the lore and the fighting. When you run into other humans, you can communicate via proximity chat. In Call of Duty, other players use this to spew trash talk at you. But with ARC Raiders, chances are that the other plays will be nice to you. They may say, “Don’t shoot,” or “Friendly,” or “We’re just here to loot.” And so your first reaction, unlike any other shooter game out there, is to keep your finger off the gun trigger.
I’ve got out into the wild with friends Mark and Rex and Dan, and they have had interesting results. Once, at an extraction elevator, Mark and I pulled the trigger to call the elevator and then we hid in a small shack. Another human tossed a grenade in. Then Mark started yelling, “Don’t kill us. We’re old men. We just want to get out with our stuff.”
And surprisingly, the other human didn’t finish us off, even though we were crawling around. So we crawled into the elevator. The other human was getting shot by the ARC drones and couldn’t press the button. So one of us was able to press the button, even though we were crawling, and then all of us escaped alive with our loot. While that guy threw the grenade at us first, he simply may have wanted to disable us from shooting him. But he didn’t have the cold heart to finish us off. That was reassuring.
Of course, I’ve had encounters with the dark side of humanity too. I ran into one solo explorer in a hallway and we both said we were friendly. When I let down my guard, he shot me. And this weekend, Mark and I were playing again. We dropped into the world and ran into two players who were surprised to see us in the swamp. The one with the woman’s voice said we gave her a heart attack. But neither of them had their guns out, and I put mine away. The other guy had a voice like a robot, like a voice converter.
We went through the whole mission together and identified a spot where we could get out in nine minutes. We had to run fast to get there, and all four of us went. Mark called the elevator for extraction, and then we hid in the bushes. All of a sudden, shots rang out and Mark started telling me to run for it. I did but got shot in the back. The other team had decided to kill us and take our loot just before escaping. Mark was yelling, “You’re horrible human beings. You Rats (human killers)! We’re old men. You didn’t have to kill us.”
Mark, who is at level 40 (the max is level 75), says he has had lots of reassuring encounters with humans throughout the game. Some will team up with him and give him some of the highest level loot (purple) in the game. But let’s hope the friendly climate survives.
Conclusion
This game has so much depth. And yet it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of triple-A games, like elaborate cutscenes or well-known voice actors.
It only costs $40 instead of the usual $70. But Nexon and Embark can keep feeding new content to fans, and now it has a brand new triple-A franchise that could keep growing for generations of games — at least until Nexon’s next big bet takes its place.
This game nails the experience it was meant to deliver. It gave players something fresh to play, even as they saw new installments of Call of Duty and Battlefield. It gives me a rush every time the action becomes intense in the world. And there’s some guaranteed drama whenever you extract and draw all of the ARCs from the heavens upon you. I give it a five out of five stars.
Disclosure: I played the game on a Falcon Northwest Tiki Gaming PC with an Nvidia 5090 graphics card and a 32-inch Samsung Odyssey G8 OLED 81SF. I also played ARC Raiders on an HP Omen 16 League of Legends Limited Edition The vendors provided me with the hardware for the purposes of reviews.