I am Arc Raiders-pilled. I’ve got a countdown timer to the release of the game pinned to my Arc Raiders-themed desktop wallpaper. Like everybody else, I was devastated that the game didn’t get a shadowdrop during Summer Game Fest. But that’s okay. I’m a grown man. I can wait to play a video game. Surely…
The only problem is, nothing else is giving me the same hit asArc Raiders. I’ve tried and failed to recapture the magic elsewhere. Nothing else even comes close. So allow me this list of reasons why I can’t stop thinking about Arc Raiders. It’s as close as I can get to actually playing the game.
10Arc Raiders Got My Heart Thumping Like 2017 PUBG
I think the best games are the ones that actually make you feel something. There are only a handful of games over the past decade that have done that for me: PlayerUnknown’s Battleground, Apex Legends, and, more recently, Supervive.
Arc Raiders actually blew all of these out of the water. The extraction mechanic - with the lift you can actually share with other players, or the rumbling train through underground stations - made those last-minute mad dashes even more compelling.
I can’t tell you how many times I died while waiting for the train. We live, we die, we learn.
9The Sound Design Is Unreal
I play a bunch of games, usually the newest ones, and I can tell you that Arc Raiders has some of the best sound design I’ve ever heard in a video game. Yes. Ever! The trailers don’t do it justice really, it has to be heard to be believed.
The sound of the whining Arc robots, the distant shots of a Ferro, or the garbled sounds of a fellow player eating a burrito in a nearby building, forgetting their microphone is on. While theoverall aesthetic and design of Arc Raiders is fantastic, it’s really the sound design that does it for me.
8It’s A Competitive Game I Can Happily Play Solo
These days it’s pretty hard to get the gang together for a night of gaming. We’ve all got a lot of other responsibilities, and our time is spread out across different games and platforms even when we do get a few spare moments.
I hope that Arc Raiders might actually get everyone back to the same game, but even if it doesn’t, I had an absolute blast playing Raiders on my own, making friends with random people, and attempting sneaky solo loot runs to feed my Scrappy little cockerel as many bits of fruit as I could find.
7Loads Of Intense Fights
The game has a really decent time-to-kill inasmuch as there’s a lot of individual agency in fights. You can sort of back off and heal like you would in Apex Legends, which makes the fights have a more elevated tactical necessity rather than something like Battlefield or Call of Duty where you’re often dead before you can react.
It also means that solo play often leads to these really, really intense battles. They got me sweating, for sure.
6There’s Already An Active Community
I’m a part ofa few different communities that have been formed around Arc Raiders, and the game isn’t even out yet. There are 30+ groups, LGBT-friendly groups, hardcore groups, and casual groups. Everyone just seems buzzed about playing the game.
This makes it much easier to find some folks to tackle the Arc with when it releases later this year.
5No Other Shooter Is Ticking The Same Boxes
You might’ve seen that there was a massive increase in players on Battlefront 2 following the end of the Arc Raiders test. I don’t think this was a coincidence. Embark Studios, the team behind Arc Raiders, is made up of some key veterans from the DICE team that put together BF2.
There are plenty of similarities, such asthe third-person combatand detailed world design, that almost gave me the same Raiders feel. Of course, BF2 is an older game now, and there are people who’ve been playing it non-stop for many years. There’s nothing quite like a fresh start in a brand-new multiplayer game, when everyone is largely in the same ship. I don’t think we’ll get another one until Raiders launches.
4Escape From Tarkov Vs. Arc Raiders
I’ve tried to dabble in someother extraction shootersto try and fill the Raiders void in my soul. Escape From Tarkov seemed like the natural starting point.
Tarkov is incredibly sweaty, and I am awful. It’s not a bad game by any means, but with such a specific and singular niche, it’s populated with a lot of players with hundreds of hours in the game. As a noobie, it’s nigh-on impossible. I simply don’t have time to die 15 times in a row.
3Hunt: Showdown Vs. Arc Raiders
Hunt: Showdown is a little more accessible than Tarkov, but also just as difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to each round - hunting the monsters, evading other players, handling environmental attrition - and these also make the experience extremely sweaty.
It’s a great time, don’t get me wrong, but as a solo player just dabbling in the genre, it’s quite inaccessible. I’d love to spend a bit more time with it, but I’ve got that sort of ‘it’s already too late’ feeling.
2It’s A Casual Extraction Shooter
I think Arc will fill a gap in the market for extraction shooters. It will be sweaty. Obviously. These games always are, but with an approach to solo gameplay that comfortably allows you to go on a looting run without running into too many other players - if you want to play that way.
And why not? If you just want to jump on and make some progress, you don’t have to get bogged down in some intense PvP if you don’t want to.
1I Just Didn’t Get Enough Time With Arc Raiders
If I’m being this effusive over the game after just a few hours of gameplay, what will the full release do to me? What do Embark have planned for the actual game?
It felt pretty feature-ready during the tests, so I’m really interested to see whether they’re still going to polish and refine it, or if the big reveal for the launch will be a tonne of extra content.
