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I’ve got an ARC Raiders Items confession to make. Last night, I died to Wasps those little floaty drones with four thrusters, a weak machine gun, and a nasty little taser several times in a row. You don’t really respect Wasps at first; they look like mechanical mosquitoes, bumbling around and shooting ineffectually. But in a crowd, the way they dip and dart on their thrusters makes them a real menace. And that taser shot? It’ll ruin your day.
I respect them now. The ARC machines terrorizing the player-controlled raiders topside are no joke. When I first heard Arc Raiders described as an extraction shooter, I did what any loot goblin would geared up to make someone else’s night miserable and steal their haul. Turns out, that’s not what this game’s about at all. The robots are the real threat, and if you don’t treat them like it, they’ll leave you bleeding out in the dirt.
The more time I spend with Arc Raiders, the more I realise it’s less about shooting things and more about surviving them. Every encounter feels like it could spin out of control at any moment. One minute you’re scavenging in peace, the next you’re ducking behind a rusted car as a giant mech drops out of orbit and starts painting the ground with mortar fire. You can’t plan these moments they just happen, and that unpredictability is what makes them brilliant.
The focus on these godless killing machines means Arc Raiders is very likely going to become the extraction shooter that breaks through into the mainstream which even Arena Breakout: Infinite and my beloved Escape From Tarkov have failed to do and the reason for that is that Arc Raiders no longer really feels like a PvP game with a few AI NPCs in for good measure. The ARC are the main event, and shifting that focus away makes for a much richer game both in terms of the experiences you’ll find but also because it means PvP isn’t the priority, so you’re unlikely as a new player to spend your entire time getting reamed by megachads who have more time to play the game than you do.
The combat has this wonderful sense of chaos to it, where everything feels a little too physical, a little too real. Fights aren’t tidy. They’re scrappy and improvised, with your squad scrambling to find cover or a clean angle before something explodes. The game’s physics do a lot of the heavy lifting here enemies topple, limbs shear off, debris goes flying but what really sells it is how reactive the robots are. They don’t just stand still and take it. They flinch, retreat, readjust. You get this strange illusion that cheap ARCR Items they’re learning, even though they’re just running clever routines. Blast a thruster off one of the flying enemies and it’ll start bouncing around making it that much harder to hit, even as its own aim remains true.