Credit: Source: Embark Studios

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As someone who has never been fond of extraction shooters, I’ve had plenty of reasons. First, there’s no ‘real’ sense of progression — drop in, do some looting and raiding, engage in fights, and repeat. Second, the plot is seldom fleshed out, especially when the bar for narratives in gaming is set so high. Still, it’s also been easy to see why others like the genre, and why this space in gaming has blown up so much ever since *Tarkov *birthed it.

I’ve even gone out and said that we don’t need more looter-shooters, and yet, after twenty hours in Arc Raiders, and twenty more if you count the playtests, I’m a believer. Embark Studios’ *Arc Raiders *is, without a doubt, the most accessible, enjoyable, and beginner-friendly looter-shooter in gaming, and it achieves that while still having incredible depth, gorgeous visuals, and some rather unbelievable polish and optimization. If you’ve ever been on my side of the fence regarding extraction shooters, *Arc Raiders *is perhaps the only game that could veritably change your mind.

A review code for Arc Raiders was provided to the XDA team by the publisher. The game was tested on a desktop PC.

Systems

Released October 30, 2025

ESRB Teen / Violence, Blood

Developer(s) Embark Studios

Publisher(s) Embark Studios

Engine Unreal Engine 5

Pros & Cons

• Exceptionally accessible and easy to grasp

• Brilliant, weighty, and satisfying gunplay

• Gorgeous visuals with stellar optimization

• Supportive and surprisingly friendly community

• Speranza hub feels lifeless and menu-driven

Arc Raiders price and availability

Arc Raiders is available on Windows, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, and GeForce Now. There are no physical editions of the game at launch, and the game comes in two editions:

• Standard Edition ($40): The base game.
• Deluxe Edition ($60): The base game, 2400 Raider Tokens, an additional outfit with new color variants, backpack cosmetics, face cosmetics, and an extra emote. Scrappy the Rooster also gets a cowboy hat with this edition.

It’ll take you five minutes to understand everything you need to

In Arc Raiders, the world, as we know it, has ended. The planet has been taken over by deadly machines of all sizes, and humanity hides underground in Speranza, the last full-fledged city. Speranza needs resources to function smoothly, and that’s where you, the player, come in. As raiders, you carry out runs on the surface, collecting resources, seeds, and carrying out quests.

This isn’t Tarkov-like in the way it would keep you fighting, scavenging, hiding, and measuring your every move for hours. Instead, each run in *Arc Raiders *lasts about 15–20 minutes, with a hard cap of 30 minutes, after which the entire map gets wiped out by an ARC missile. However, it isn’t just you against the machines here. Throughout each run, you will be running into other raiders, who could be friendly, or they could just shoot you immediately to take your loot. Every time you encounter another raider, it’s a gamble, and that’s part of the fun.

I love the gameplay loop, but it’s nothing new

Arc Raiders does everything brilliantly, regardless

It’s the moment-to-moment gameplay in* Arc Raiders *that will have you thoroughly engaged, so much so that I can’t wait to get back to my next raid as I write this. Once you’ve extracted safely back to Speranza, the hub, you’ll visit traders who sell devices, healing, guns, ammo, and everything else you might need. Then, craft your own grenades, devices, and consumables, and off you go.

Each trader in the game will give you quests to complete, which would determine exactly which map you go to. For example, when I wanted to upgrade my gunsmith table with mechanical tools, I’d rush to complexes with mechanical resources to loot, because the game neatly tells you what kind of resources you’d find in a building on the map.

Of course, the higher the loot value of a place, the more likely you are to run into other raiders who are equally possessive about their own loot, which almost always leads to firefights breaking out while the ARC drones recklessly destroy anyone they see moving.

I do, however, wish that Speranza was real, explorable, and an interactable hub instead of a menu with multiple screens. Still, we’re only in version 1.0 right now, and as promising as the future for this game is, I do have strong hopes that the game’s only central hub could become more fleshed-out as the months pass.

The gunplay is solid, and impossible to have complaints from

I literally have zero notes

The gunplay in *Arc Raiders *is, well, brilliant, for lack of a better word. Right out of the gate, any weapon you use, whether its a light handgun that shoots small pellets, or a makeshift rifle with 10 bullets per magazine, the weight and impact of each bullet and shot is nothing short of remarkable. Every weapon in the world of *Arc Raiders *has a put-together feel to it, so when you finally unlock and upgrade a shotgun, or a hand cannon that takes out a flying drone in a couple of shots, there is simply nothing more enjoyable.

There’s a higher chance of running into a friendly raider than a combative one.

Then, there are the firefights. Look, there is a higher chance that you’ll run into a friendly fellow raider than a combative one, but there is no avoiding a firefight in this game. So when you and another raider are duking it out, the combat feels real. It’s not going to be a long, drawn-out fight, either. One of you will get the upper hand, and it won’t be long before you’re either healing, or looking at a meny.

The real meat and potatoes of the game, however, is the enemy AI. Arc Raiders’ enemy AI is perhaps the greatest I’ve ever encountered, because Embark Studios, the developers, used Machine Learning to teach the ARC machines their animations and movements.

The enemy AI is unlike anything you’ve ever seen

This is how artificial intelligence should be used in gaming

In Arc Raiders, the enemy AI are infuriatingly clever. Take out a flying drone’s propeller, and it will immediately manage to utilize the other three to stay afloat and keep attacking you. Take two engines out, and you’ll see, in real time, how the physics and weight of the drone change to try and accomodate the attack. If you try to cheese the enemy by hiding or ducking in and out of cover, it will almost always change tactics, evolve, and attack you harder, forcing you out of cover while learning your movements on the fly.

I learned this the hard way when a Bombardier enemy kept shooting rockets at me while I was neatly hidden behind metal walls that its projectiles couldn’t get through. After three failed attempts, it just switched tactics and showered missiles on me from above, and I didn’t even get the time to understand that it had learned what I was doing and adapted to it. It almost makes me wish for an exclusive PvE mode where I can just fight the bots and keep figuring out new ways to take them out.

Even a single drone can be dangerous, and early on, you will be terrified of the mechanized enemies in Arc Raiders. They are unforgiving, clever, and extremely ingenious when it comes to taking the player out, which only makes every firefight that much more interesting and exhilarating.

The world of Arc Raiders is absolutely stunning

And it doesn’t come at the cost of your hardware

*Arc Raiders *in an Unreal Engine 5 game. In 2025, that means some pretty bad assumptions to break through, considering the state that some major AAA games on the same engine have come out in over the course of this year. With optimization being a very rare virtue that only a handful of big games have come out with in 2025, you’d be forgiven to assume that *Arc Raiders *would struggle to perform well on any PC that doesn’t have a $2000 graphics card or more. However, somehow, the game runs phenomenally well on almost every PC out there, and it looks downright gorgeous while doing it. Even without ray tracing, the game looks gorgeous, but if you do have a 30-series card or above, turning on global illumination is definitely the way to go.

If you have a 30-series card or above, ray tracing is definitely the way to go.

At launch, there are four maps you can drop into — Dam Battlegrounds, Buried City, Spaceport, and The Blue Gate. Outside of Dam Battlegrounds, the other maps are unlocked slowly as you keep doing rounds in the game, because the difficulty gradually scales, too. As such, the game makes sure you have a few marks on your skin before letting you through into bigger, tougher, and more ARC-ridden maps.

Dam Battlegrounds puts players in a decaying, swampy map with industrial complexes scattered around. There’s plenty of cover wherever you go, but that applies for rival raiders as well. Buried City is the map with perhaps the most personality — a metropolis completely buried under sand, with only a few residential complexes, hospitals, and industrials labs peeking out. I couldn’t help but think that this is what Spec Ops: The Line’s version of a buried Dubai would’ve looked like on Unreal Engine 5.

Then there’s Spaceport, the one I found to be the least unique. Rich in industrial and technological loot, Spaceport does have some of the highest-loot areas, but also gets very dangerous when it comes to Arc presence. The Raiders you find here will be seasoned, so keep your head on a swivel. Lastly, it’s The Blue Gate, the map that gets unlocked at the very end, that is the most beautiful. Arc Raiders is a vibrant, gorgeous game, but The Blue Gate enhances it further with its grassy mountains and misty roads.

The game’s optimization is phenomenal across older hardware

As amazing as Arc Raiders looks, it’s also heavily optimized. I had no problems running it on a constant and stable 60fps on my partner’s 1660 Ti-powered 1080p PC, and I even bought the game a friend with a 3050 Ti laptop, where we managed to get a 70-fps experience with the game still looking pretty decent. Of course, it was my own RTX 4070 Ti that I had the most fun with — a constant 100+ fps experience with ray tracing and graphics all set to the max, and that’s even before I had to turn on Frame Generation.

In fact, in the forty-ish hours I’ve spent playing Arc Raiders, I encountered zero game-breaking bugs. No crashes, no jittering or stutters, and no frame drops. It was honestly hard to believe, and the only credit to be given here is to the team over at Embark for pushing out such an incredibly-polished game at launch.

My optimistic heart can only hope it remains that way

Arc Raiders’ community is the best part about the game right now. In the 200-odd players I must have encountered over my playtime, I can count on both hands (and feet) the number of times someone shot at me with the intention to kill. The game, especially in solos, is extremely enjoyable because other solos are there to loot and stay safe, too. I couldn’t possibly count the number of times I’ve run into someone, and before I even got the time to react or whip out my emote wheel to ask them not to shoot, they had already greeted me, told me not to shoot, thanked me for not shooting, and then gone along on their way.

When you meet players like that way more often than you meet others who would shoot you, leave you for dead, and take your loot, the game itself becomes infinitely more rewarding.

The beauty of the game comes from strangers willing to help you, or more importantly, just let you be.

There have been multiple times that I paired up with another stranger in the middle of a firefight against the ARC — no words spoken, just shooting the machines and going on our own separate ways with just a ‘thanks’ shared through emotes. That’s the beauty of the game right now — strangers willing to help you, revive you if you’re down sometimes, come together against a bigger threat, or, even more importantly, just let you be. However, this wasn’t the case in teams, where every time I dropped in with a duo or a trio, I almost always got into a firefight with a rival team. Even when my team decided to remain complete pacifists, there were a lot of times where we lost all our collective loot because the other team shot first and didn’t listen to our requests to not engage.

I even met an angel in the game

My favorite memory in *Arc Raiders *so far, is when I had called the extraction elevator, but was cornered by three formidable ARC drones. I just had to hold them off for 45 seconds, but they got the best of me. With zero shields, zero heals, and just 5% health and a grayed-out screen, I couldn’t risk peeking or engaging. I even tried debating if I should cross half the map to escape and find another extraction point, but that’s when I heard someone over proximity chat.

“Yo, is there someone in there? Do you need help?” That’s what I heard before meekly responding in the affirmative. Fifteen seconds later, three very distinct explosions rang out, and this stranger had taken out all three of the drones outside. I couldn’t stop thanking him as he laid smoke grenades to help me reach the elevator without any more damage, and all he did was shrug it off, tell me he needed to use those grenades on the machines for a quest anyway, and we were done. I’m never going to meet that guy again, but I’m certainly going to pay it forward.

What makes Arc Raiders so damn good?

For started, *Arc Raiders *sounds amazing. This game boasts some of the best sound design in gaming that has ever blessed my ears. Every explosion, ricochet, player action, and machine whirr echoes through my headset with crystal-clear detail. What seals the deal, however, is the emergent chaos. My best-laid plans for where to go and what do, would almost always go awry, with machines, raiders, or both, making me change directions, objectives, and equipment on the fly. However, when my plans went south, the gameplay experience I got then was ridiculously better and more glorious, getting my heart thumping as the threats loomed nearby.

Furthermore, the game itself wants you to enjoy yourself. *Arc Raiders *provides you with XP and progression even if you fail a run, and you never feel like you just wasted half-an-hour of your life on a failed. That’s because the moment-to-moment gameplay of looting, avoiding ARC, making potential friends, and extracting safely is just so damned addictive that you’d do it all over again just for the way it keeps you engaged.

Systems

Released October 30, 2025

ESRB Teen / Violence, Blood

Developer(s) Embark Studios

Publisher(s) Embark Studios

Arc Raiders is a brilliant extraction shooter that solves almost every problem the genre has, making itself the best possible recommendation as a looter-shooter for the masses.

Engine Unreal Engine 5

If you were to ever consider playing extraction shooters, Arc Raiders is inarguably the place to start.

It’s alright if you still can’t warm up to the idea of extraction shooters, but if you were to ever consider the genre, *Arc Raiders *is inarguably the place to start. It’s an incredibly deep, well-polished, and accessible extraction shooter that helps you along your way, while still remaining immensely fun, every minute you’re playing it.

That’s a rare game in today’s day and age, especially so for a genre that threatens to be reaching over-saturation. Arc Raiders’ roadmap for the future is truly promising, but I very well would’ve been happy for the game to remain the way it is, and that only speaks to how complete and rewarding the game feels at launch.