The phrase ‘industry veterans’ has long been a meme — when newly opened studios use it in their advertising campaigns, their releases often disappoint.
Embark Studios is not one of them — it was founded by people who worked on various parts of Battlefield, and their debut joint project, THE FINALS, was a huge hit. It turns out that squad-based PvP shooters can still surprise us, especially when they feature impressive destructibility and dynamic, intense matches.
Now Embark has presented its vision of the more niche but quite popular genre of extraction shooters, and it turned out brilliantly — ARC Raiders is so good that people will be discussing the game for a long time to come.
A surviving planet
In the ARC Raiders universe, Earth has had a rough time. First, there was the Cataclysm (with a capital C), which destroyed almost all life with a series of natural disasters — not everyone was able to survive the earthquakes, floods and fires.
When it was finally over, the Dawn Era began — people tried to restore the environment and rebuild everything. But at some point, alien ARC machines began to rain down from the sky, and Earth was once again in danger — the robots destroyed people and ‘monstrously efficiently’ extracted the resources that humanity needed. The first wave of machines was defeated, albeit with heavy losses, but now the second wave has begun, with more advanced and durable ‘arches’ — and we must participate in their extermination.
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Since there is no story campaign in the game, you learn details about the universe in bits and pieces — from short CG videos, the local codex with descriptions, and dialogues with characters who give out quests.
The story of the world is mainly told through the environment — each of the four locations reveals details of what happened without unnecessary words.
The flooded lands near the dam experienced the fiercest battles during the First Wave and look particularly battered. The buried city was hidden under sand dunes for a long time, thanks to which the residential architecture has been best preserved there. The spaceport is littered with storage facilities, warehouses, and unfinished rockets — after the Catastrophe, a small group of people fled into space on shuttles, leaving the rest behind.
And the Blue Gates are beautiful foothills where olive groves neighbour underground labyrinthine complexes.
We need more junk
The essence of ARC Raiders is simple: you appear on the map with your chosen inventory, run around looking for valuable items, fill your pockets with them and escape. Among the junk you collect, there may be resources needed to create better equipment, trinkets that merchants will pay a lot of money for, consumables (bandages, grenades, etc.), weapons, and much more — even lemons and apricots falling from low trees, which will come in handy for something. Each map has marked areas that promise medium and high-quality loot, but often you don’t even need to approach them — you can often find valuable items outside of them, simply by entering a dilapidated building and searching the boxes there.
Alone — just right
ARC Raiders when playing in a group and alone — similar but different extraction shooters. When three players run together, there is no room for diplomacy — in the vast majority of cases, no one tries to negotiate. Solo runs are completely different — their unpredictability constantly generates funny (and not so funny) stories, which make you want to start the next one right after you finish the current one.
Sometimes you choose whether to become a participant in these stories or go about your business. Sometimes you find yourself involuntarily drawn into them and decide on the spot what to do. Along the way, you meet people you’ve never seen before, but in five or ten minutes you can become either friends or bitter enemies with them.
