Ten hours into Arc Raiders, I felt betrayal’s sharp sting for the first time.

The round began with generosity. I met a fellow raider who had dropped me a rare shotgun as well as a damaged heat sink to upgrade my workbench. They asked nothing in return. It was one of many friendly encounters I’ve had roaming the surface of Arc Raiders’ hostile maps, but I also felt my heart rate rise: when you die you lose everything you’re carrying, so I knew I had to reach an extraction point quickly and quietly.

On the way, I met another player. We exchanged “don’t shoot” emotes followed by our actual voices on proximity chat, agreeing to cover each other until the exit. I even dropped him some bandages.

Fool.

As a set of pneumatic doors whirred open, a rolling, beeping robot – one of the titular ARC drones – exploded in our faces and in the confusion, before I realised what was happening, my companion turned on me and fired. A red flare erupted from my body, pinging against the ceiling and resting next to the smoking carcass of the dead robot. “Evil,” I said, although inside I admired his opportunism. “It’s just a game, man,” he said, although his voice was tinged with guilt.

In the crowded field of extraction shooters, Arc Raiders feels unique. It combines punchy combat and the inherent tension of the genre with surprising social interactions: fragile alliances made at gunpoint, hopeful pleas for help, bands of players gathered on roofs, playing musical instruments together. I’ve negotiated truces mid-gunfight and silently formed bonds with raiders as we fought flying ARC. I’ve met players from Norway, Austria, Newcastle, and Edinburgh, and now we raid together, terrorising ARC and players alike.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

In this world, humans have been forced underground by the robots that roam the surface. As a raider it’s your job to go “topside”, grab supplies, and return within 30 minutes via extraction points that dot Arc Raiders’ four maps, varying from a city buried in swirling sand to a dormant spaceport. Loot is everywhere, in lockers, drawers, lying on desks, in crates you prise open with a crowbar, and on the bodies of downed raiders. Everything is useful either in combat, as a crafting item, or as a source of cash to spend on better gear.

It’s been touted as an extraction shooter for beginners – a simpler, more colourful alternative to the militaristic Escape from Tarkov, and it succeeds in easing players into the genre. You can take unlimited free loadouts that give you basic weapons and healing items, which means you risk nothing. Loot is colour-coded by rarity so you know what to drop, and the chime of purple items remains exciting after 30 hours. You can mark items that you need for crafting recipes, missions are clearly explained, and locations are marked on a comprehensive map.

But welcoming does not mean easy, and even the simplest ARC can kill you. When that rolling Pop exploded it shredded my armor and two-thirds of my health bar. Pesky Wasps and armoured Hornets are easy to destroy on their own by shooting their thrusters, but two can overhelm you if you stray from cover. And if you see a floating Rocketeer or hear the demonic hum of its engines, run. The difficulty of the PvE is perfectly tuned, encouraging preparation and careful positioning, and the rewards of taking down the biggest enemies are worth the hassle.

ARC are drawn by noise, and everything you do is excruciatingly loud. Every time I crack open a crate or breach a door, the creak of metal reverberates in my bones, knowing that I’m broadcasting my location to anyone nearby. It is deliciously, painfully tense.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

I love the unpredictability of meeting other raiders: the awkward conversations, the emerging etiquette of specific voice lines, the uneasy agreements to put your weapon away, the slightly panicked shouts of “friendly, friendly” as you enter an extraction point, praying you don’t get sniped by a camper. As a solo player, you’re as likely to trade pleasantries as you are bullets, although some players will shoot on sight. Duos and trios are less friendly, although my squad once formed an unspoken alliance with another group to take down a Rocketeer.

Combat is its own reward: gunshots feel suitably heavy, bullets crack against walls and splinter shields with a blue fuzz of draining energy. Weapons feel makeshift and are difficult to control. The more loot you carry, the more sprinting and rolling drains a stamina bar that always seems to run on fumes in crucial moments. There are no damage numbers or hit markets, so you’re relying on blood spurts and changes in players’ behavior before to know when to push, firing until you see a flare (which, in turn, draws other raiders to the area).

The sparse UI grounds you in the world, adding to the tension. When you call an extract via an elevator or, in the buried city, an underground train, there’s no countdown timer. Just a booming voice promising that help is – all too slowly – on the way. You cower in a corner, wincing at the wailing sirens and flashing lights.

I have not once felt bored. Some rounds are non-stop firefights, others are slices of a horror game as you creep over metal metal grates and through dark corridors with a torch, dodging headcrab-like Ticks. Sometimes I do a full circle of the outside of the map, just to explore. Other times, I focus on my quests, going in with a single objective before inevitably being distracted by a firefight. Occasionally I take a free loadout and just go for kills. There’s a whole map – the scenic mountainside town of Blue Gate – that is still a mystery to me, and I can’t wait to learn its secrets.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Unfortunately, everything gets a bit fiddly after a round finishes and you’re turning in quests, crafting items, or organising your inventory.

You cannot, for instance, search for an individual item in your stash, and that gets more annoying the more loot you collect. You can break down items into their component parts for crafting, or sell them for cash, but some items labelled as “recyclable” turn out to be essential for upgrades in your workshop, which the game doesn’t tell you. I burned through all my rusted tools only to realise that I needed them for my weapons bench, and I spent several runs hunting them down all over again.

Most upgrades to your workshop – where you do most of your crafting – require multiple items, but you need to collect everything before you can deposit anything. For that weapons bench upgrade I needed rusted tools, mechanical components, and drivers from downed Wasps. As I hunted the tools, the other items sat useless in my stash, taking up space.

Quest progression feels uneven. The very early missions are solid introductions to the basics, but 20 hours in I was being asked to complete tasks I’d already done several times. I’d cracked open six Baron husks - giant, long-dead ARC corpses - before the game asked me to do it for a quest.

These niggling issues, however, are all forgotten when a round starts – moment-to-moment, Arc Raiders is just that good. I’d happily play rounds without an objective, simply basking in the chaos and variety.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

And then there’s the AI-generated elephant in the room.

Developers Embark uses generative AI for voice barks, such as when you ping a location or items, and it’s trained on consenting voice actors. Aside from some strange inflection and the occasional mispronunciation – laboratory reagents become laboratory regents – it isn’t jarring.

But it raises a broader point about the use of AI for voice acting in games, as explained eloquently by Edwin last week:

The AI generation of videogame voicework has been a focus in discussion of whether generative AI adoption will lead to job cuts and a general erosion of working opportunities, with big budget tools such as Microsoft’s Copilot often described as a way of magically increasing productivity without raising costs. In July last year, the US actors union SAG-AFTRA called a strike, demanding that videogame publishers agree to proper constraints on what companies can do with recordings, to protect the livelihoods of performers.

The Finals [Embark’s previous game] has come under fire for its usage of text-to-speech, with Embark protesting back in 2023 that “making games without actors isn’t an end goal.” In my interview about Arc Raiders, I asked Grøndal for more specifics about Embark’s voice actor contracts - are there any limits on what the developers can do with that voice data? Grøndal was unable to go into specifics, partly because he didn’t have the information to hand, and partly for the usual confidentiality reasons […]

After some confusing statements, Embark has also clarified that Arc Raiders doesn’t include any gun models generated from Youtube videos, and that another AI project, to create animations for enemies, is purely research, and not designed to replace any developer.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Inevitably, that project will become a reality. Whether it’s used in Arc Raiders, and whether that changes or hampers the work of developers, remains to be seen, but it could well change how I feel about a game where the mere presence of genAI already makes me feel slightly icky about recommending it. It is worth keeping an eye on, as I’m sure RPS will be.

After all, Arc Raiders wants to be one of your “forever” games: it already has a roadmap for the rest of the year that includes a new map as well as new Arc enemies, items, and quests.

Its long-term strength will rely on the quality of those updates. I’m not yet deep enough to know whether Arc Raiders will feel this compelling at hour 100 or whether, in two months’ time, I’ll still be dreaming about it.

For now, all I know is that its metallic hooks are in me, and I cannot stop playing.