ARC RAIDERS

Extracting the best bits of a difficult genre

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Everyone seems to be making an extraction shooter nowadays. Marathon, Exoborne and EVE Vanguard are all on the horizon, Team Jade’s Delta Force made room for an extraction mode, and then there are all those examples that didn’t make it, most notably Hyenas and The Division: Heartland (reportedly one of two games Ubisoft was making in the genre). This makes for a rather unusual gold rush, since, for all the successes of Hunt: Showdown and Escape From Tarkov, you'd struggle to argue that this genre has broken into the mainstream. But it’s evident from the first moment we step into ARC Raiders’ post-apocalyptic Rust Belt that it’s exactly this audience Embark has in its sights.

The game is presented with all the polish you'd expect, given its maker’s pedigree. Embark was founded by veterans of Battlefield studio EA Dice; its debut was 2023’s similarly shiny The Finals. While the maps here lack that game’s destructible scenery, they're just as environmentally varied, crisply realised and sumptuously lit, and at a grander scale. Then there are those huge robots in the distance...

First, though, ARC Raiders introduces the genre’s precepts as gently as possible, through a kind of narrativised tutorial. In it, you scavenge the wasteland for scraps, then get mugged by a pair of strangers who leave you for dead. Welcome to the extraction shooter, where progression comes twinned with loss.