ARC Raiders (2025)

The duality of this game keeps surprising me - I had one round where a player shot me in the back whilst I was looting, and then the very next game I got blown up by an ARC machine 100m away from extraction with 1 minute left on the clock and then another player ran past out of the fog and came to me as I shouted for him. He rad a revive kit on him, picked me up and we got to the elevator with 1 second left to go.

Early impressions: This is my first “extraction shooter” and I’m enjoying its combat’s enemy and sound design but left wishing it were much heavier on that combat and more structured so far. My early sessions have been a lot of looking around and maybe collecting some unremarkable-feeling materials and loot, with only occasional quick skirmishes. Enemies are satisfying to beat and also quite easy to die to (not a bad thing). There’s some tension in how hard it is at times to make it back to base with your stuff, but also I’m not sure if I even care? The game has quests and progression that are pretty skeletal-feeling at the start and leave it seeming pretty focused on a loop of crafting / salvaging and then going out with the crafted stuff to fight stuff and get stuff to do more crafting / salvaging. Think I only care for the shooting, so I hope as I keep playing I’ll figure out how to just do more of that, but I struggle to imagine getting super into this longterm once the novelty wears off.

This is a decent game, but I just don’t think extraction shooters are for me. It kind of has the same problem of me as Fortnite where I feel like a lot of the time I am not running into people so it’s not as fun when it’s just solo (or in a group and not running into groups),but then it has the additional problem of having to deal with the inventory in game and back at the base. The gunplay is solid enough from what I’ve played. In the end, for me this is like a low 7/10 game because I can see how it can be fun and I have a little fun playing it, but because of what I talked about above, it isn’t for me.