Went into a raid solo, called the extraction lift. Some dude runs up - I shout “Don’t shoot, let’s extract together!” He shoots me instantly, of course... Then another random guy shows up - I scream “Kill that bastard!” He actually does it! 😂 Loots the traitor, helps me extract, and we both ride the lift like brothers in arms. Betrayal, revenge, teamwork - all in one minute. Absolute masterpiece.

First game, fresh drop, gear barely functional, and, i full of confidence. I'm scanning for loot when I hear this THUD. I peek over the ridge, and there it is, a 4 legged chrome beast. I thought, "Cool, I'll just sneak around it." Big mistake. The second my flashlight flickered, it turned like it heard my GPU fan spin up. The ground starts shaking, and suddenly this thing is charging me like it's late for a firmware update. I hit it with grenades, bullets, nothing stops it. It vaults over cover, tracks my every dodge, and when I finally think I lost it behind a rock, the thing flanks me. FLANKS. I didn't know bots could hold grudges, but apparently Embark Studios wrote the AI like, "If player breathes, hunt player." Thanks, Embark, never been hunted so efficiently by something without emotions.

No fishing. My disappointment is immeasurable

Good game but getting sick of being asked to pay for a game to just be bombarded w/ skins that cost half the game

Already had the chance to play this before in the Server slam &' i gotta say, Embark Studios knows what they are doing. I can't wait to nerd the shit out of this game &' just enjoy my time, but since no one will ever see this review ill just admit it... My hype to this game might be huge, but my thighs &' ass are MASSIVE.

Lore: The clankers have taken over Logical conclussion: We should work together to fight against them Your average player: We should kill each other instead Good game, but I still hope one day someone will make a good extraction shooter that lets you just do the pve.

The game is absolutely great and all, but I’ve got just one question… …where are the dinosaurs?

If you've played The Finals, then you know the quality to expect from this game. My first game ended with me tagging along with a random dude who simply said "Don't shoot. Let's leave together." And it was beautiful.

The developers promised to build a tractor and have demonstrated it twice during two beta tests. People want a tank and don't understand why it's a tractor.

Don't trust anyone in ARC Raiders, i thought i had a friendly raiders finally but nope, they shot me in the head when I was extracting, that's really fucking shit, and now i'm developing trust issues ..

The latest game that every single streamer plays and hypes into the stratosphere for 2 weeks before going back to Call of Duty or BF6. If you're anything like me you've been bombarded with videos about this game with people saying how emergent and different and compelling the gameplay is - especially in solos - and how fantastic the community is, citing examples of shouting out on voice chat "don't shoot!" and working together with other randoms to complete objectives and extract together or working with others to bring down bosses. My personal experience was not like this at all. I think I was shot to death in 2 seconds flat by someone who had vastly superior kit after initially spawning on my very first raid. It's like what would literally happen to me if I volunteered for a foreign warzone in real life. Maybe I got to loot a single container beforehand, I can't remember. Pressing E to search a bin feels like something I've done 3,000,000 times before, its no longer memorable. I'm not sure the staggered spawning method this games utilises - where there's two "waves" of spawns into an area - is particularly any better than systems in other games. All other raids I tried before I refunded were extremely typical of those other games: people camped the extract and mercilessly came after me, we're pointlessly playing a deathmatch when it'd obviously be better to all just leave together. People didn't even take my stuff for the most part (as it was T1 trash anyway) but simply denied me the loot I'd painstakingly dredged up from every rusty bin in the wasteland. Oh yay I get to play out the Prisoner's Dilemma time after time again! On a wider point that is not specific to ARC Raiders I really have to question whether bin-diving deserves its pivotal place in modern gaming. Press E, watch the rummage bar fill up, do a bit of very basic inventory management. A boring abstraction of the everyday experience of shopping - an activity I have to do in real life with gruelling frequency. In ARC Raiders, of course, just like when I go to Malik's Mega Market down the street late at night there is a certain chance of being mugged. The ever-present risk of being mugged does make shopping more stressful and fraught but does it make it more interesting? Does it make it fun? In my view: no. Maybe in the future every game will be a chore simulator with time-sink mechanics requiring you to play for 2,000 hours. Surely all of us want a second job. Maybe the future is already here! I'm not arguing the game shouldn't have PVP. Far from it. What would this game be without PVP? It would be so stale, just another Wasteland Supermarket Sweep. Reduce it to a co-op shooter and it really wouldn't have any staying power. You want to talk about market saturation? Co-op shooters are all broadly identical and I'd argue the AI enemies here are interesting only because they're a part of a world which also includes other humans as potential allies or - let's be completely honest, the far more likely alternative - camping, trigger-happy griefers. I'm willing to admit mileage will vary from person to person. If I'd had a single good or memorable experience solo then I might have carried on playing this game desperately chasing the dragon. "One day a fun thing with a random person might happen again!" The equivalent was my first few weeks of PUBG, which were full of strange interactions, people danced on rooftops with no clothes on, offered me a lift, weaponlessly chased me around... no-one had a clue what was happening and it was wildly silly. Fast-forward a year, I'm still playing it, hoping to recapture that and the actual experience is landing, looting for twenty minutes, then getting my head blown off by someone in a ghillie suit 10 miles away. Streamers may be paid to advertise a dream version of this game (either directly or because it's the new hot thing to get views and revenue) in which fun interactions and scenarios constantly play out and every Raid "is like a movie"! Any of us who have played a multiplayer game of any sort shouldn't fool ourselves. This type of thing is always going to be rare and, over time, as the playercount inevitably dwindles following the opening weekend and the streamers move onto the next thing like locust, the servers will be emptier and awash with cheaters and even more silent enemies with good guns, more robotic and implacable than the ARC. This is the reason lots of people are demanding a PVE mode; not because it would be a better game but because it would be a broadly consistent experience, un-tethered from a human element we are all cynical of. ARC Raiders is reliant on random people online not being assholes for its real high points and we all know that people online are, like, the worst. The truth is, even if I'd had a few hours of emergent fun with this, I couldn't recommend it as the future of the game is so obviously laid out for us all to see. Miscellaneous Other Points - I hate the "BUY ME" splurge of cosmetics at the hub. Completely nonsensical in the setting of the game, obviously, and wildly overpriced. Just another feature that all games must now have or shareholders start jumping off rooftops. - I'm dubious about Embark's insistence on using AI all the time, I'm not sure exactly how much has been done here - I've seen various reports - but its a really depressing practice by these devs in particular which feels mainly about cost-saving at the detriment of, you know, humanity's actual future. Ironic given the premise, eh? - I've seen streamers bang on about the uniqueness of the world but it feels exactly as novel as the starting area in the original Destiny. Oh a rusty bus and a satellite dish. Wow. Similarly all the junk weapons and stuff feel very tired and generic. Again, I don't know why this is being sold like the Emperor's New Clothes? If you love the gameplay just say so, it's in a completely middling sci-fi wasteland setting. That's fine. I saw one guy in absolute fake-orgasm mode about how beautiful it is and, come on, you've played a video game before. You've seen this. - Third person. All debate about this is pointless really. You have to accept people can see you around corners. I think it makes for objectively worse and less immersive gunfights where you're tactically swinging a camera about for an advantage but it also means you get a nice animation when you're rooting through a bin and you can see the hat you paid $40 for. - Solo queue. There isn't one. It seeks to put solos versus solos but you will potentially end up against squads and you won't know it. People say this is so the community isn't split but the community IS split by default between people on their own and people with friends. I don't see a compelling reason not to actually split the queues. Again, I've seen this sold as an immersive atmospheric thing: is there another guy with this person, be safe, stalk them, listen out for companions blah blah blah. In reality it'll boil down to this: you potentially versus multiple coordinated human enemies when you call the exit lift. Decide whether you want that experience. Your answer may depend on whether you are a streamer who gets paid to play video games full-time or you're a normal person.

It's great, i'm addicted to the game. But keep asking player feedback after every run which is super annoying af

This loosing items at end if you get killed make the game to be just a waste of time.

The cosmetics pricing is bad. Worse than Embarks own F2P game. A bundle with a single raider skin is more than half the price of the base game and more than twice as expensive as The Finals or Hunt Showdown. This shit you can pull in a F2P game, but it has no place in a paid title. The devs even removed the possibility to earn premium currency through challenges. Your only chance to get some is the battle pass, which grants you 500 or 5 bucks. I'm frankly tired of Embarks constant stream of grievances bundled together with a great game. Get it on a steep discount because monetization is priced as such. I've played the tests. I know the game is good, I said they have a great game. Not the point of this review.

great game, i love clankers and they love me (putting bullets into my ass)

For a PAY2PLAY game this has way too much of a focus on the Store, and not enough focus on the earnable cosmetics and outfits via gameplay/challenges. If this was free2play I'd understand, But so far I'm getting a big red flag on the store having soo many things compared to the deck(s) Obvisouly the game is great, I have had zero issues in the test other than crashing, and my first two matches so far are flawless. Hopefully they respond well to critism and critique. And dont just cater to Stock Holders and Greedy CEO's.

A player and I were trying to fight each other but we both were getting our booty kicked so hard by AI we decided to team up and extract together instead. Humanity needed a greater enemy than itself and that is Arc.

Amazon drones have taken over. Solo experience isn't a game, it's an adventure.

Overhyped. Movement is sluggish. Gunplay is sluggish. PVP encounters are meh. PVE enemies are boring bullet sponges. Feels more like a running simulator where I have to gather different kinds of scrap. Will come back later to see gameplay feels smoother.

A terrible experience. Being forced to pvp with toxic sadists whose only objective is to prevent others from extracting and ruin their fun in order to engage in their own egomania. This is a PVP game, not a PvPvE game. You will be shot on sight by other players who ignore the ARC enemies shooting at them at the same time just for the fun of it. The same people will also kill and you in extract even though they don't have time to loot you. Because it's fun for them. A disaster of a game filled with horrible people.

Edit: Regarding the 2.7 hours comments, read the first paragraph. -------------- I don't write reviews but Arc Raiders is an interesting enough situation to warrant saying something, at minimum to my Steam friend group. As it stands, I have 2.7 hours in the main game but enough hours combined when considering the pre-release tests. Still, the amount of hours and enjoyment had do not equate to $40. The devs behind ARC Raiders are extremely talented. The game looks, sounds, runs, and feels incredible. It's truly polished in almost every area. The AI is smart and challenging. The overall design, lore, and aesthetic are unique and show real care. The launch was perfect. However, once you get past the presentation, the game starts to fall apart. The core loop is short and repetitive, even compared to other extraction shooters. The in-game events are kind of cool, but also lack depth. Loot is generic and cumbersome with its multi-layer recycle design, fetch quests feel extremely lazy and dated, and the skill tree doesn’t add much. The leveling and currency systems don’t create a real sense of progress. There’s no strong feeling of loss on death or reward on survival. It's more of the boring, same old stuff we've already been playing but without any of the depth. Because these things mean very little, it feels like there is also very little reward to killing other players. In a way this is a fresh and unique take compared to other extraction games. However this only plays to the toxicity of combat where there is more merit in killing for "fun" than any other purpose. I personally don't feel that satisfaction from killing anyone in this game, I just feel like I'm ruining someone else's experience by dropping in on them at an opportune time. It's very rarely ever fair of course, it is an extraction shooter after all, but I do plenty of fair killing in other PvP games to feel any satisfaction here. Instead, trying to help players is a refreshing and unique playstyle, but again, very little purpose or reward. Embark - the cash grab is crazy. The skins are average, can’t be mixed or customized, and cost way too much. $20 for a small skin bundle on top of a $40 game is unacceptable. The polish and care put into the design and art makes the contrast of greediness in the cash shop feel jarring. I want to be a fan of Embark. You have an incredibly talented team, but the seedy, quick cash mentality from those calling the shots overshadows everything good you've built. The shift to an extraction shooter reflects this, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that decision caused frustration within the team itself. Y'all deserve better. ARC Raiders is extremely artistically and technically impressive, but those merits alone do not make a good game. It’s getting a lot of praise right now, and some of it is deserved, but much of it is truly driven by hype. As I write this review, it is rated "Very Positive" which will without a doubt fall to "Mostly" or "Mixed" within the next few months. Most players won’t stick around, leaving a small, sweaty toxic group that will make it very difficult for new players to enjoy. Unless something major changes, the game will either have to shift to free-to-play or watch its player base disappear within a year.

I thought there might finally be an extraction shooter with good gameplay and monetization. Nope, the gameplay is PEAK but why does a premium game have cosmetics that are over half the price of the game itself?

The game went way too hard into the "Get more loot just for the sake of it" The pvp is okay~ish until you realize that rare loot is so common that you're better off not killing anyone because you'd not be able to carry anything more. This game feels like you have nothing to do except be a loot goblin for the sake of it. It feels like the developers wanted to go hard PvE (Imagine that, just like they originally said they would!) but the suits got invested and now they dropped a $40 game where your only interesting gameplay is to ruin other people's gameplay for little to no reward. Mind you, I'm a Hunt: Showdown veteran, there's nothing to do except kill people for the hell of it. After 10 hours I've already unlocked every map and am nearing the point where I can prestige. TL:DR: After 15 hours of gameplay I have been endgame for a while now. No real goals once you get in-game makes the game feel bland and scatterbrained. Maybe updates will fix it but right now this just feels pointless and can't decide what it wants to be.

First raid in, 3 mins and I was knocked out by players and flying drones. What is this??? Not fun!

Woke DEI bs! We can have very obviously African hairstyles but not balding? Not to mention a "premium-shop" in an almost 60 dollar title, what are we doing guys!?!? No arc nerfs either seemingly.. way to kill the playerbase at launch! Expect 3000 players by the end of week two...