Extraction Shooters are the topic of conversation right now. With Marathon’s reveal and Alpha meeting mixed responses, the debate has shifted to asking: “Which of these games will be the one where the genre goes mainstream and attracts a wider audience?” While everyone has been distracted by Marathon in the last few weeks, I have spent 18 hours with Arc Raiders, and it turns out that Embark’s latest stands the best chance of breaking the genre out of its niche corner of the industry. 

That comes down to a lot of streamlining and excellent quality-of-life features that make the game’s many systems and progression much more appealing to those who have felt lost in games like Escape From Tarkov and Hunt Showdown. But, excellent gunplay and some of the best sound design I have ever heard in a shooter play a big role in helping players stay away from gunfights they don’t want to be in the middle of.

A Familiar Formula

For the most part, Arc Raiders’ match-to-match flow is as you would expect from the genre. You load in alone or with up to two other friends to drop onto one of three maps: the factory-filled Spaceport, the rural swampy Dam, or the congested and cramped apartment-filled streets of the Buried City. Each map offers a different kind of landscape in which to survive and fight. 

Your goal is to collect loot to craft into better gear or sell to buy stronger gear, weapons, equipment, consumables, etc. You can also avoid or take down robots scattered around the map, which act as your PvE enemies, or kill or befriend other players (Raiders) who are doing the same thing as you. Once done, or your time runs out, you then have to escape while an escape hatch or route slowly opens, and you guard your supplies before quickly scarpering. 

Largely, there isn’t much here you haven’t seen before from an Extraction shooter on the gameplay side. However, I will say the robot enemies are a nice twist from the human enemies found in almost every other game in the genre. They are incredibly cool visually and mighty deadly. While the small flying drone-like Hornets aren’t a problem, each map is also sprinkled with much tougher robots, like the armored Rocketeer drones coated with damage-resistant armor, and fly in a straight line to their targets while raining down missiles beneath them. There are also giant quadrupedal robots that can kill you with one burst from their laser cannons, as the shots echo through the buildings and open fields.

While some robots are easy to take down, you still have to coordinate with your team to pick off targets together, as one mistimed attack can lead to your death if you aren’t prepared. Arc Raiders is a slow, methodical game, and I struggled in my first few hours with it as I tried to figure out how it wanted me to play it.

You have a pretty punishing stamina bar that takes 10-15 seconds to fully recharge, lengthy gun reloads, and slow consumable usage that forces you to be smart about where and when you recharge, reload, and run. You can’t just sprint across an open field or duck behind a container and heal instantly. Before I learnt that, I found myself getting caught in the open or shot down almost instantly as I tried to run for an escape hatch. 

But, as I played with some devs and playtesters who have dozens of hours in the game, I began to appreciate Arc Raiders’ careful and considered playstyle that rewards teamwork or knowing when to engage and when to stay out of a fight that sounds like a deathtrap.

This pacing also means that you can easily stay out of the hotspots and explore one or two buildings on the outskirts of the map and escape without facing too much opposition from challenging robots or other Raiders. It makes the friction initially way less painful as the maps are big enough to support this, but not giant, open wastelands or small, claustrophobic hellholes. 

The Tools and Sounds of War

Embark is made up of a lot of former Battlefield developers, and their other shooter, The Finals, is one of the best FPS games this decade. It manages to take the long time-to-kill of that series and combine it with a fast-paced, arcade, team-based shooter that lets you destroy the whole map (something Battlefield is still trying to do more than a decade later).

Here, the studio has managed to create a similar captivating concoction by combining the pacing and methodical gameplay of Escape From Tarkov with the tight third-person gunplay you would find in The Division. However, the cherry on top is the game’s utterly unbelievable sound design, rivaling that of the most prestigious award winners in the industry. 

I have already discussed the game’s pacing and flow, but when it comes to gunplay, Arc Raiders strikes a pretty good balance of what hardcore and casual players would want. It isn’t forcing you to contend with ridiculous recoil spreads, but you still have weapons that kick harder than your average gun in Call of Duty or Battlefield. 

The closest comparison is something like The Division, where guns feel tactical but not cumbersome. They take a little bit to get used to, but they are strong, impactful, and able to down a Raider with a few well-placed shots.

There is a good variety too, from bolt-action rifles, pistols, shotguns, and fully-automatic sub-machine guns, although they all look fairly bland (silver rusted metal, with no fancy flairs or camos). Every weapon comes in one of a few different rarities, from common to legendary, and you can notice the difference with higher rarity guns. For example, during my last play session, I picked up a rare pump-action shotgun that was able to obliterate Raiders up close in one or two shots, and led to my whole team stocking up on a ridiculous amount of rare loot that allowed us to take on a tough challenge in a future map.

I also found an epic SMG that a dev assured me was “an easy way to outkill any Raider”.

The weapons also feel great, and the pops and clicks as you fire them or reload them are incredible and give them a futuristic, half-finished, put-together feel. Those sounds also pierce throughout the map thanks to Arc Raiders’ sound design.

I am not overselling it when I say that the sound design and audio here is some of the best I have ever heard in a shooter. I could hear how gunfire ricocheted off the walls in a building. I could feel the stomps of robots from five blocks away because of the impact they make. I’m not just talking about sounds in your immediate vicinity either, as I spent more time with Arc Raiders, I could physically pinpoint how far away gunfights were exactly, and hear the differences between gunfire that came from ground level and had to pass through obstacles and gunfire that came from rooftops or open fields.

I could hear when a turret was targeting an enemy and distinguish the laser fire and weapons between the different robots to understand what was up ahead and how far exactly. 

It is incredibly impressive and changes how you approach an extraction shooter, as you can properly plan your movements, playing into the slower pace of Arc Raiders overall. It also rewards long-term players who begin to learn the differences between the way Raider weapons and robot fire sounds.

The top-notch sound design also makes the game far more welcoming to newcomers, as you can easily hear where gunfire is coming from and stay away. You will always find a rogue team off in the middle of nowhere, but the game makes it very easy to distinguish the areas that have a lot of traffic and the areas where you will be safer through its sound design. 

Clear, Defined Directions

Arc Raiders also works hard to onboard players as much as possible into the overall experience, economy, and progression. 

The game tells you how much every item is worth and allows you to sell those items for money or recycle them for other materials. You can buy most core items and weapons if needed, and you can craft most gear from lower-tier materials. You can even find a lot of crafting recipes for items and equipment while exploring. They aren’t locked behind tough challenges; they can just be found like anything else. You can tag materials to be highlighted when you find them and easily sort everything in your inventory.

You can also find random valuables, rare loot, and duplicate weapons that you can sell to make a quick buck, allowing you to get back on your feet fairly easily after a tricky run. Five MMO-like vendors give you quests to kill certain robots or find specific materials, giving players a clear and meaningful objective to try to complete every time they load into a map. 

Unfortunately, these vendors are all menu-based, and there isn’t a hub or main village to explore, despite the game’s setup suggesting Speranza would be explorable from all the trailers and marketing. Instead, you just go from menu to menu, where you see these characters sitting in their shops. 

However, it seems that the main long-tail progression during each season is going to come from the game’s skill tree. This is the first extraction shooter I can think of that has one. There are close to 150 different upgrades spread across three sections affecting resource gathering, mobility, and survival. 

These skills are all meaningful, cumulative boosts to your stats that allow you to harvest resources faster, search boxes quicker, and recover stamina in less time. Climbing takes away less stamina, healing is more effective, etc. These will all allow you to take on harder and harder robots on the map and engage in PvP in stronger zones. Even making just a few upgrades during my preview, I noticed a sizeable difference in my stamina recovery rate and search time, just to name a few. 

Additionally, Embark seems to be going with a limited-time event style of model, where at any point, a version of the map could change to switch things up. For example, we played on the Buried City map at night on the final day, and it played entirely differently from how it does during the day. Instead of sniping from rooftops before you enter an area, you could play it more cautiously and sneak through buildings and from street corner to street corner to loot, engaging in more close-quarters firefights.

There are also unique enemy encounters and moments, like increased spawns of a particular robot. However, you can also engage in Destiny-like raid puzzles. On the final day, our three-person squad set out to extract resources from a Harvester pod on the Spaceport, which was being guarded by a quadrupedal Queen robot circling and protecting it. 

This involved opening containers locked in the pod by solving a series of small puzzles (place cylinders in slots, shoot failsafes, etc), working together, and hitting buttons at the same time. This had to be done while contending with the pod’s defense mechanisms and avoiding the Queen circling the pod outside. We managed to do it, only to get shot by another team and have to zipline over a wall to make our escape.

It was exhilarating, and these high-stakes moments intrigued me the most, as we had to spend a good hour or two preparing for them. I hope there are more moments like that, the further into the season the game gets.

Overall, all of this works to make Arc Raiders far more approachable and palatable for players who aren’t invested in the genre already. I don’t think it’s going to pull over hardcore Escape From Tarkov fans or Hunt Showdown players. But, I don’t think it’s trying to. Arc Raiders feels like it is trying to keep the core of the genre and touch up the rough edges to give players the best chance of having that “one more round feeling” that fuels the genre’s thrills and heartbreak. 

You are still going to have moments that turn off players. I did in my play sessions. Moments where you are shot five seconds from escaping and lose everything, but Embark is trying to cushion those falls as much as possible while still offering up meaningful and challenging endgame activities and loot to chase once you are fully geared up.