(Image credit: Embark Studios)

Give PC gamers a shooter, and they will extract the movement tech locked within it. Arc Raiders is an intentionally hefty shooter that rewards positioning and stealth over lightning-quick reflexes, but players are still finding techniques that speed you up or assist a daring escape.

If you want to add a little spice to your raids, you can and should learn the ways of the ledge grab. By holding spacebar as you fall, your raider will catch any nearby ledge and hoist up. The timing is generous, and it doesn’t seem to matter how far or fast you’re falling before you grab the ledge.

The tricky part is that chaining grabs together requires letting go of a grab before you climb the ledge. Of course, you can also take it to extremes by leaping off a cliff, crossing your fingers, and aiming for something to grab—like in this clip below, where a street light turns into a quick-descent elevator.

There’s so much sick movement tech in this game! The potential is INSANE from r/ArcRaiders

I’ve really taken to the ledge grab. It’s not flashy or difficult or even that much of an advantage against other raiders (it’s only good for going down, not up), but that’s what I like about it. It’s a subtle quirk of Arc Raiders’ grounded movement that makes you look at every map in a new light.

I also enjoy that the ledge grab is janky. It’s just unreliable enough that you wonder if the mechanic is even intentional as-is, which makes learning it cooler. It wouldn’t be as fun if Arc Raiders’ skyscrapers were dotted with Nathan Drake-style handholds—the point is the feeling that you got away with gymnastics outside the bounds of a third-person shooter that usually keeps your boots glued to the ground.

The next frontier of ledge grab techniques? Grabbing and leaping horizontally off a ledge so fast that you can shimmy left or right (as shared by AlphelionAudio on Reddit). I’m not entirely sure when this would be useful—unless you’re ducking out of the way of an Arc or hiding from players—but I dig it.

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Some movement tech you can do that can be a little tricky to pull off but could certainly have its use cases from r/ArcRaiders

Then there’s the movement tech that’s very much intentional, but nevertheless fun to understand. Like, did you know you can combat roll after a long drop to completely mitigate fall damage? There’s a limit to how far you can fall and still execute it, but time it right and you’ll feel like an olympic gymnast.

Undoubtedly the pinnacle of Arc Raiders movement at the moment involves the Snap Hook, a legendary quick-use gadget that lets you grapple zip up to virtually anywhere. In keeping with Embark’s affinity for grapple hooks in its other game, The Finals, the Snap Hook also lets you cancel out of the animation and carry your momentum—a fact that I discovered the hard way when I brazenly fired the hook at a distant ledge, assuming the game would launch me safely into the intended window.

Yea, that one’s gonna take more practice. I probably could’ve saved myself by zipping to the ledge instead of the space above it, because as we’ve established, the ledge grab is a generous tool that will save your life.

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn’t pay him. He’s very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he’ll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don’t, though.

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