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00:00The mark of a truly stellar multiplayer game is when you and your friends are
00:04having as much fun in your 50th hour as you were in your first, and that's a test
00:09Ark Raiders passes with flying colors. This is without question the most hooked
00:14I found myself on an extraction shooter, with clean and tense gunplay, an
00:19incredibly satisfying progression system, and a loot game that has me sweating
00:23over what to put in my backpack and what to leave behind. Even with a few bugs to
00:28gunk up the gears, just about every journey topside to scavenge from the
00:32wastes, and battle devious robotic overlords, has been a complete blast,
00:36especially when accompanied by friends.
00:41After years of promising but uneven attempts, Ark Raiders feels like the first
00:46to fully realize this genre's potential, and has set a new standard for it in the process.
00:58Ark Raiders follows the usual extraction shooter formula of dropping you into a hostile zone to
01:04take down NPC enemies, scramble for loot, and then get back out alive. All while
01:10looking over your shoulder for rival crews who would love nothing more than to crack
01:14you open like a meat pinata and take everything you've collected.
01:20It doesn't do much to iterate or expand on those fundamentals,
01:24but it does absolutely nail them, and that's harder to do than it might sound.
01:31Even some of my favorites like Hunt Showdown and Escape from Tarkov have always felt like rough
01:36drafts of what these daring high-risk, high-reward multiplayer games could be,
01:40so it's long overdue for us to get a highly competent and very polished version like Ark Raiders.
01:47One of the main ways it succeeds is in its stressful gunplay. Weapons only have a few rounds in each
01:53magazine, they take a good deal of time to reload, and the robot NPCs are either much faster than you,
01:59or can rain down missiles. This means I'm usually feeling like a rodent sneaking around to scavenge
02:06food and supplies from the world before slinking back to base, but when a fight does break out,
02:11it's charged with delightful anxiety thanks to the knowledge that you're about to either lose
02:16everything you fought for or grab some awesome gear off the corpses of those you've bested.
02:21That's true against both AI-controlled opponents and human players, but I've been genuinely shocked
02:26by how nice much of the community has been. Especially when playing solo where other solo
02:32players are prioritized in your matches, I found it downright commonplace to encounter friendly folks
02:38who are more interested in working together than fighting, which has been a really nice change of
02:42pace from the normally sweaty matches. Granted, I've also run into plenty of people who say they're
02:47friendly, only to shoot me in the back of the head and then shout a racial slur at my corpse,
02:51but hey, it's still better than that being the norm. And if I do find myself interested in some good
02:57old PvP, the non-solo queues tend to be a lot more aggressive, which gives a chance for these high
03:03stakes bouts to shine. Dodge rolling to avoid incoming gunfire and ducking behind cover to heal up,
03:09before returning fire on an enemy squad is some of the most fun I've had in an extraction shooter,
03:14especially when you've got an arsenal of interesting gadgets, grenades, and leveled up guns
03:18you've bled for over the course of numerous matches. For example, I did a number on my opponents with my
03:24Torrent light machine gun, and coming locked and loaded with a handful of Wolfpack grenades that send
03:30homing missiles everywhere to take down drones before they become a threat made me feel unstoppable.
03:35It might not have the mechanical crispness of something like Remnant 2, but it's leagues above
03:42what we've seen in a live service extraction shooter before.
03:49Of course, if you're battling online foes, there are moments where you'll come up short and lose it
03:54all to a rival player. That stings, but it just wouldn't be as fun without that risk. The beauty of
04:02Arc Raiders and what makes it far more approachable than most other extraction shooters is how effortless
04:08its easy come, easy go loot feels. One way it accomplishes this is by providing pretty substantial
04:14free loadouts to use when you're down on your luck, which are just powerful enough to get you back on
04:19your feet after a successful run or two. Plus, it gives you lots of ways to regain better equipment,
04:27like crafting and upgrading your own using spare parts you've collected, or by just buying some
04:32hardware from a vendor using cold hard cash. Even when you're getting shipped back home to your base
04:36in pieces, it's hard to feel like you've been set back for very long, since a single good run can
04:41reverse your fortunes, and that's definitely worth the occasional gut punch when you're taken for all
04:46you're worth. There are still some instances where losing your hard fought loot just sucks though,
04:51like how you'll occasionally get matched against an organized crew of three while playing solo.
04:56There were also times where I fell victim to unfortunate bugs that resulted me in losing
05:01some of my most cherished items. Once my character became stuck in the environment until enemies
05:06picked me off, and even after being revived by teammates, I was unable to dislodge myself.
05:11And I ultimately lost that torrent machine gun I loved so much when I phased through the environment
05:16while climbing a ladder, falling to my death. Thankfully these occurrences were extremely rare,
05:21and one really impressive part of Arc Raiders is just how well it runs otherwise, maintaining a
05:26rock-solid 60fps on Xbox Series X, and pushing well beyond that on my high-end PC.
05:32But while I can count on one hand the amount of times I've found myself pissed off at the injustice
05:37of a bug across the 50 hours I've played, when the stakes are as high as they are, even a tiny
05:42amount of this kind of stuff can be downright infuriating. The main reason its hyper-competitive
05:49dynamic manages to never sting for long is its incredibly well-designed progression system,
05:54which brilliantly makes every match an opportunity for forward momentum, even when you've just lost
06:00all your best loot. Arc Raiders accomplishes this by giving you a whole bunch of treadmills to run on
06:05at the same time. There's a quest system that unlocks bits of story and introduces you to various mechanics
06:12by giving you a checklist of stunts to pull off, character XP you gain just by playing matches that
06:17grant skill points to dump into skill trees, crafting stations that can be upgraded with the right
06:21materials, weekly trials that grant all sorts of powerful rewards upon completion, and the expedition
06:28project that lets you prestige and reset your character in exchange for vanity rewards. Things like
06:34the skills you unlock aren't always particularly interesting, but there are just so many different ways
06:39to make satisfying progress, which goes a long way toward making Arc Raiders more approachable than its peers.
06:46I've been thinking, maybe they didn't make it. Maybe they burned out in the void.
06:51It's good the mechanical progression is consistently engaging, because the story told through its quests
06:57doesn't impress. Not that it's really what you're here for in the first place. Worldbuilding actually has a lot of promise,
07:03as I'm genuinely curious about the post-apocalyptic surface world that's been ravaged by environmental
07:09disasters and the mysterious motives of the robots that now control it.
07:13Something's changed. We've seen a lot more probes beaming across the skies.
07:18But there's almost nothing to flesh it out beyond a few dialogue snippets while chatting with vendors,
07:23and some small drips of lore about the mechanical minions you're fighting. I hope they'll dig into this
07:27stuff more in the future, because it's a neat foundation in theory, but it's pretty clear developer
07:32Embark Studios didn't care much about the story at all. That's perhaps best exemplified by the fact that
07:38many of the voices are done by AI, which is extremely apparent in their flat and unremarkable deliveries.
07:44Well, if it's an arms race they want, they can get one.
07:47One place that worldbuilding does get to shine, though, a little bit, is across the four maps that are
07:52currently available. All of which are very cool and have distinct vibes to them, from the ruined husk
07:58of a waterlogged dam to a city buried in red sand. It's a good thing that they're so great to look at,
08:04too, because you'll spend a whole lot of time trekking back and forth through them in search of loot.
08:09With only a handful of areas to explore, it wasn't terribly long before I felt like I'd seen the
08:13vast majority of the zones, but there's also tons of hidden nooks and crannies and secret areas that
08:19can only be accessed with the proper know-how or rare keycard drop, which did a great job at keeping
08:25me interested in retracing my steps. Another thing that makes exploring each zone really rewarding
08:33is learning how to best the various NPC opponents you find along the way. What starts out as tiny
08:39drones that can be fairly easily brought down quickly turn into swarms of dangerous hovering robots
08:45and their more intimidating siblings that can only be destroyed with the aid of some serious firepower.
08:50Some of the interactions between these robotic foes are pretty impressive, like how hovering little
08:55surveillance cameras called snitches will mark you for execution for all their friends, who then fly
09:01in to attack you, or worse yet, rain in ballistic missiles from a distance that turn the area around
09:06you into a blast zone. The way the enemy is able to work together to overwhelm you with superior numbers
09:12and instantaneous coordination makes getting caught out in the open an incredibly scary situation that
09:18I lost many a loot haul to. There's also a nice mix of your basic roly-poly enemies that shoot fire or
09:24explode but die when they're so much as sneezed at, and massive scary looking robots like the marauding
09:31queen enemy that can only be dealt with by a fully loaded group of raiders. That said, these automatons
09:36aren't the most critical of thinkers and often lose track of you the second you duck behind a tree
09:41or turn a corner. They also seem to have trouble navigating some of the environments, and you can
09:46sometimes see them look like they're confused, wandering off, or getting stuck on the corner of a
09:51building before giving up the chase. Another nitpick I have with fighting the NPC enemies is just how long it
09:57takes before you stand a chance against any of them aside from the weakest drones. I probably played
10:02for over 20 hours before I felt properly geared to take down one of the spider-like leapers or deadly
10:07rocketeers. I would have liked for a faster climb towards being able to confront some of these baddies,
10:12because for a stretch there I felt like I'd never be able to, and tiptoeing around can get old after a while.
10:18ARK Raiders raises the bar for extraction shooters pretty much across the board, with an incredibly
10:29gripping progression grind, tense fights against NPCs and other players that make for memorable matches,
10:35and loot that feels completely worth all the work and stress it takes to obtain it. The fact that it
10:40manages to also run well and look amazing all the while is just downright impressive, even if a few bugs
10:47here and there lead to the rare rage quit. For years I'd been wondering when someone would take the
10:52awesome promise of this genre to the next level, and ARK Raiders is without question what I've been
10:57waiting for. For more recent shooters check out our reviews of Battlefield RedSec or Painkiller,
11:04and for everything else stick with IGN.
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