ARC Raiders Review

Extraction shooters spent a decade being built for the kind of player who enjoys losing everything. Embark's change is not to soften that, since you still drop in and you still lose the pack when you die, but to make the half hour before that happens worth having on its own. The ARC machines are the reason. Fighting a rolling Bastion alongside two strangers and no plan produces a better story than most scripted set pieces, and proximity chat means the strangers who walk into that fight can be talked down as easily as shot.

Third person changes the geometry of every encounter, so peeking over cover becomes the whole language of a standoff. Speranza gives the loop a home worth upgrading, vendor quests give a raid a reason, and the gunplay is the most polished work Embark has done. The world, a 2180 Earth with Tenerife standing in for the ruins, is specific and beautiful rather than grey. The one real blemish is the voice work and the text to speech row that followed it. Sixteen million copies sold and ninety two percent of critics recommending it, and it has earned both.