GAME of the YEAR

Celebrating the absolute best of the last 12 months of PC gaming

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BEST MULTIPLAYER

ARC RAIDERS

Morgan Park: Best Multiplayer suits Arc Raiders nicely, because it’s worth celebrating how Embark has broadened the extraction shooter in ways that almost defy the genre label. Yes, it has loot lust, yes it has gear fear, but by tweaking the incentives that drive players toward each other and uniting the community against a common threat, Arc Raiders has achieved the improbable: a PvPvE where most people are pretty chill.

As I wander around picking apricots and asking strangers for directions to a field depot, Arc Raiders scratches at the edges of an MMO environment—a shared world where everyone’s doing their own thing, even if that thing is sometimes shooting innocents on sight.

Evan Lahti: It’s also one of the achievements of the year. Four distinct, gorgeous maps that run at a very high frame rate. Enemy AI and pathfinding that beats everything else in the genre. Launched with zero major bugs. You load into matches incredibly quickly. Only modest server issues despite a popular launch.

Jake Tucker: Sometimes, I spam the Don’t Shoot voice line when I find solo Raiders and then shoot them in the back as they run past me, just to feel something.

Sean Martin: That was you?! Honestly, I enjoy how peaceful Arc Raiders is. I’m so used to playing extraction shooters where I’ll get ominously executed by some sweat who was waiting for me in a bush for half an hour, that it’s super refreshing to work together to take down a bigger threat, in this case: giant murderbots. In many ways, Arc rewards you more for forming tentative alliances for mutual profit, than it does for blasting everyone in sight, and that’s just one of the many things that distinguish it as a great multiplayer game.