What scares me? In real life, the answer to this is heights and octopuses, but when it comes to videogames there's nothing quite as scary as a robot: inhuman metal enemies that can soak up an unknown amount of punishment and just keep on coming.
It's robots that are the scariest thing you'll face in Arc Raiders, an upcoming PvPvE extraction shooter set in a post apocalyptic future where a robotic menace has driven mankind deep underground, only emerging to seek out supplies from the ruined world above. It's the latest game from The Finals developer Embark Studios, and it feels like it could be a perfect mainstream entry point for the extraction genre, with several good ideas and a distinct visual style that make it stand out.
And there are the robots—the Arc that give Arc Raiders its name—which after a few hours spent with the game's closed beta a few weekends ago, I think are a core part of the appeal. Compared to the poorly-armed mercenaries and malnourished scavengers you're usually throwing down with in the extraction genre, the Arc offer a unique experience, a little sci-fi flavouring that sets Arc Raiders apart from others in the genre.
The scouts are manageable: tiny quadcopters that are easily disabled by knocking out a couple of their rotors with carefully aimed shots. Everything past that is a serious threat if you don't pay attention: wall-mounted sentries catch you out in dark corridors, floating gunships remind me of the Terminator universe's hunter killer drones. There's a weird ball that explodes in a gout of flame when you get close to it.
Taken separately these are easy to deal with, but when you're keeping an eye out for other players—who are more often than not likely to shoot you on sight—and scuffling around like a truffle pig that has been trained from birth to find valuable loot, you can quickly find yourself in situations that threaten to erupt into a full-on crisis.
There are two ways to extract from an Arc Raiders match that I've found so far. The safest option seems to be the cargo hatches that require you to bring a key into a match that will allow you to sneak away to safety. The more common option is sluggish cargo lifts that take things from the surface down into the depths below. Calling a lift triggers a wailing siren that will draw in every robot and enemy player within a mile radius, all desperate to take a bite out of you. Survival feels like a little miracle every time you extract with your ill-gotten gains.
But that's the danger, of which there is lots. I found I didn't mind, because Arc Raiders is a beautiful game and traversing the maps that make up its world is a joy. Each map contains a mix of partially destroyed buildings and interesting terrain that means firefights have tons of verticality. One encounter in a research lab had me fighting off an opposing duo of players while Arc drones lazily buzzed past the windows hosing automatic fire at whichever of us they could see. After I'd killed one of the pair and backed myself into a small room with every wall open to some form of threat, I opted to leap from the window and hope I landed on something on the way down that would break my fall non-lethally. It didn't pan out, and I pancaked myself into the ground. So it goes.
I could write a thousand words here about how much I love the look of Arc Raiders and not accurately describe its beauty, so just look at the screenshots contained in this article and realise that in motion (there's a new trailer embedded above) it really works and feels like an active push against the realism of extraction shooters at the moment. Escape From Tarkov and Arena Breakout: Infinite present the same kind of grim, war-torn decay as DayZ. Arc Raiders swings the pendulum the other way: there's a hopeful optimism to the look of this world where the robots won, a retro sci-fi aesthetic not just in Arc Raiders' cool-as-hell promotional art, but in the backpack you wear that's built on a real steel frame so you can hold more weight, or in the weird headgears you can choose to wear with your cosmetics and the weapons you wield.
Future imperfect
If I have one concern it's that the weapons don't feel particularly punchy, and although they all have cool designs, they don't look like real life counterparts which makes it harder to intuit their functions and personalities. An M4, we're told in games from Call of Duty to Escape From Tarkov, fires quickly and accurately but does a bit less damage than an AK47. The starter assault rifle in Arc Raiders looks like the designers of a paintball gun and a wireless Dyson got high one night and decided to get real weird. It's only through experimentation that I'll come to understand how effective it's supposed to be compared to the rest of Arc Raiders' arsenal.
None of this would matter but it felt like I could empty an entire magazine of "light" ammo into one of the floating Arc attackers and barely make a scratch. It's hard to tell if you're doing damage with your rounds short of things falling off the Arc attackers in tense situations, and it can be frustrating to try to understand what you need to do to kill the robots sometimes. This is partially my own fault. One interesting quirk to tooling yourself up is that guns that are good at killing players and guns good at killing robots are not one and the same with each weapon telling you not just how much damage it does, but how good it is at doing damage to Arc opponents. Still, it's one thing to read "low Arc armour piercing" on a menu screen, and another to be crouching behind cover firing every round you have at a godless killing machine that's keen to wreck your entire world.
If you're carrying something light, your only hope against the bigger Arc's is to dodge and move. This is made easier because moving around in Arc Raiders is just so much damn fun. The movement system feels empowering and it's easy for you to vault over low obstacles, hop around on a zipline or even just clamber up most of the obstacles you encounter.
After a couple of hours with Arc Raiders' closed test though, I'm left with two key thoughts. The first is that Arc Raiders could be something very special indeed, a more accessible extraction shooter with a friendlier aesthetic that can still deliver the pulse-pounding spectacle Tarkov players crave. The second is that Embark Studios, developers of both Arc Raiders and last year's The Finals, might be one of the most exciting studios in the world right now. With both this game and The Finals, they've shown a clear understanding of what makes shooters tick along with a suite of compelling ideas for how to improve genres that are in need of innovation. For that reason alone, Arc Raiders is one to watch: It recently pivoted from free-to-play to premium, and Embark plans to launch it next year.
