ARC Raiders

Where It All Happens

Each expedition begins in your underground workshop where you equip weapons, gadgets, armour, and consumables before selecting a map and dropping in. Once topside, you're navigating a beautifully realised retro-futuristic wasteland, think 1970s Soviet sci-fi filtered through rust, overgrowth, and the ruined remnants of a recognisable world. ARC Raiders' post-apocalyptic premise is familiar, but the '70s/'80s sci-fi style manages to hit the sweet spot of actually being cool to look at. The four launch maps are distinct, industrial zones, overgrown suburbs, coastal ruins, and evolving weather and enemy spawns mean the same map rarely plays the same way twice.

The ARC robots that patrol the surface are the game's standout achievement from a design standpoint. Unlike NPCs in most PvPvE games who amount to little more than a nuisance, the ARC machines' AI is impressively smart, Snitch drones give up your location to a pack of Wasps that immediately come screeching down, and bigger machines like the Rocketeer, the Leaper, and the AT-AT-like Bastion are so formidable that no single raider should take them on alone. Their presence creates constant tension and forces smart routing across the map, exactly what a good extraction shooter needs.

The Human Element: ARC Raiders' Best Feature

What truly distinguishes ARC Raiders isn't the robots or the loot, it's the community it's accidentally cultivated. The game uses proximity chat, which means you can hear (and communicate with) other raiders in your vicinity. What emerged from launch was something nobody quite predicted: the confluence of proximity chat and the oppressive overworld have effectively encouraged players to help each other as often as they start blasting.

A "Don't Shoot" emote serves as an unofficial peace flag. Players form impromptu alliances to take down a shared Bastion, then part ways at the extraction point. Strangers escort injured teammates to safety. Teaming up with other good-natured players you happen to come across is like a spell you can cast in ARC Raiders that creates memories each time. For a genre historically defined by betrayal and toxic competition, this is a genuinely surprising and welcome development, and it's the reason the game has sustained a large, active player base months after launch.

Solo vs. Trio: An Honest Assessment

ARC Raiders supports 1–3 players per run. The matchmaking system is thoughtful: when entering solo, it generally adjusts to place the player against other solo players, making fair and balanced PvP encounters common, though not guaranteed. A January 2026 update also added an opt-in queue that lets solo players join trio lobbies in exchange for higher reward multipliers, a solid quality-of-life addition for risk-tolerant players.

Solo play is genuinely viable and often more atmospheric, the tension of creeping through an abandoned industrial complex alone, hearing footsteps that might be a robot or might be another player, is something trio play dilutes. However, the game is undeniably better in groups. In a group, each and every person feels stronger through the connection to another. Trio runs allow for specialisation: one player drawing robot attention while another loots, a third covering the extraction route. Solo players are never locked out of the experience, but if you have friends who play shooters, get them involved.

The One Honest Criticism

Not every critic was won over. Some reviewers found the loop tedious in isolation, slow resource runs in a cookie-cutter wasteland, with too little to work towards beyond the next gear upgrade. That's a fair assessment for a specific type of player: if you need a strong narrative drive or don't find inherent satisfaction in the tension of an extraction loop, ARC Raiders won't convert you. The story is paper-thin by design, and the game leans heavily on emergent player interactions to provide its most memorable moments. When those interactions are absent, in a quiet solo session mid-week, the game can feel like an elaborate loot sorter.

The AI voice criticism is also worth flagging. Eurogamer's review criticised the use of AI for text-to-speech NPC voice lines, calling the generated voices mediocre. Embark disputed the characterisation but acknowledged the use of text-to-speech in some NPC dialogue. For most players this won't affect the experience meaningfully, but it's worth knowing if you care about production craft at that level.