Released: October 30th, 2025
Developer: Embark Studios, Nexon
Publisher: Embark Studios
Systems: PC, PS5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S
Is it hypocritical to make a game about machines ruining human civilization when you’re a shill for so-called generative AI? Probably not, but such relativity is at least ironic. It’s also the most interesting thing about ARC Raiders.
Extraction shooters are very much in season at the moment, and the not-yet-replaced humans at Embark Studios have used algorithmically laundered plagiarism to help them dribble out a depressing little entry. It’s among the least enticing games I’ve ever played, one I struggled to make myself return to whenever I concluded each inherently unrewarding session.
There’s something to be said for a game that’s honest with itself, and ARC Raiders at least indirectly admits its entire narrative premise isn’t worth a shit. The “plot” is rapidly relayed via an infodribble cutscene – robots happened, people live underground, and raiders loot stuff topside like the Wombles of the Apocalypse. Please be aware that I’ve made it sound roughly seventeen times more exciting than it is, and that the game gives almost less of a shit about it than I do.
I’d do dire things for an apocalyptic Wombles game.
ARC Raiders gives glimpses of something good – a game of tense and fearful excursions into the unknown, where anybody you meet could be friend or foe, and one wrong move might cost you dearly. It’s a great idea, and I’d have loved to play something like that. What I mostly played was a tedious exercise in slowly opening boxes for twenty minutes before getting shot in the back and having all that time thrown in the fucking bin.
I’ll fully confess that I have… feelings… about extraction shooters. The whole “get in, grab stuff, get out” conceit is really cool, but I just don’t see the appeal of the part where you lost everything you brought with you. I don’t know why it’s so necessary to be considered a true part of the subgenre, but that’s been the insistence. If I want to play such games, I have to accept the risk factor and ought not begrudge it.
Having said that, if you’re going to ask me to risk wasting my lucrative time, you better have something worth the wager. ARC Raiders offers a soulless and uninspired game where “just because” is the biggest (perhaps only) motivation to keep rooting around in garbage like an overgrown rat. I’m gambling my night away to acquire literal trash, fighting to keep hold of literal trash, and using the literal trash I retrieve to craft things half a step up from literal trash. Between trash runs is a thrilling underground city… represented by some shitty menus.
There’s something distinctly unceremonious about the whole ordeal. You’re given nothing to work towards, nothing to fight for, you’re doing nebulous foraging for the sake of nebulous foraging, and you’re doing it in a cookie cutter wasteland with absolutely zero unique identity. Maybe that changes thirty hours in, but I doubt it. Either way, I’m not playing this tripe for thirty hours. Lumines is out by now.
ARC Raiders is trading on one special element – the human one. Any player you meet while raiding can help, hurt, or ignore you, and it admittedly makes for really tense experiences. A “Don’t Shoot” emote serves as the pacifist’s biggest ally, as well as an effective immersion aid, and there’s something quite cool about forming brief alliances with people who could stab you in the back. It makes the moments of genuine cooperation really memorable.
I like this, I really do. If it were in a better game overall, I’d be tempted to fawn.
Of course, ARC Raiders’ biggest coup is a case of players having to make their own fun. In this manner, it is less of a game in its own right and more of a facilitator, a tool with which the audience is creating its own game. Credit where it’s due though, ARC Raiders is proving itself a good enough tool that players are buying into it, and the organic encounters occurring as a result are really quite cool.
The reliance on player participation comes with a downside – you can only have as good an experience as those around you are creating, and that comes down to pure luck. My luck has not been great, and for every memorable moment I’ve had multiple deflating ones where a big run ended with a lethal ambush or sniping shot, evoking that aforementioned total lack of ceremony. I understand others have had better experiences, but I absolutely haven’t. This is the risk one takes when playing a game where enjoyment itself is a huge variable.
Such letdown losses aren’t punishing, they’re something both more and less than mere punishment. I can only call them anti-rewards. They certainly don’t inspire me to have another go, especially because of all the admin I’ll need to do, laboriously refilling my inventory again.
God, ARC Raiders is fucking tedious between runs. Navigating big clumsy menus, recycling garbage, crafting the same old shit over and over, transferring items from place to place, and seeing dozens of potential actions locked behind grindwalls. Gathering, crafting, progressing, it’s all so dull and unexciting that even the accomplishments feel unremarkable.
On top of that, the gameplay itself is just thoroughly mediocre. It’s a standard third-person shooter with guns that feel particularly shitty, unfolding at a pace that goes from overly methodical to plain fucking sleepy. Much of the “action” is spent watching your character open boxes with a crowbar, or otherwise taking their sweet time doing literally anything else. The robots are generic. The environments are barren. The ambience is barely existent.
Basic navigation is ponderous at best. A paltry stamina meter drains eagerly when doing most things, made worse by how much time is spent running across the empty large spaces between points of alleged interest. As slow as everything is, the tightly restricted inventory slots combined with a borderline lethal carrying capacity exacerbates things to unbearable levels. I’m not particularly fond of limited space or encumbrance mechanics at the best of times, but for this sluggish game to revel in both at once is bloody miserable.
So much tedium, such a slow pace, all in the hopes that you might get a cool player interaction that doesn’t end with you losing everything you worked for. That’s really all it is, too – the ARC Raiders experience is one big dice roll and the prize isn’t even of ARC Raiders’ own doing. It rests on the players who’re making their own splash in a very shallow pool. Yet again, I think about the irony of Embark Studios’ love of AI, because this game is nothing without the creativity of the human beings playing it.
That’s the rub, and the thing that supersedes anything else I’ve written about ARC Raiders – it uses regurgitative AI, and it is a traitor to its own medium in the process.
I don’t give a fuck if it’s “only used a little” or if “it’s being used the right way” or any other attempt to claim it’s okay just this once. I’m certainly not convinced by the studio’s own shitwipe claim that its use still reflects an original artistic vision – ARC Raiders has almost no originality to begin with, and AI derives its content entirely from the stolen vision of other artists.
Embark has prior, of course – it used AI to get free mileage from voice actors on its last game and seemingly did it again here. Voice actors never get enough credit as it is, and for a decently high profile studio to lead the way in disrespecting their craft is honestly disgusting. Everyone involved would do well to remember that the executive fuckheads atop the industry can’t wait to eradicate everybody from the media creation process, including any game developers authoring their own destruction by embracing AI.
All excusing this shit does is open the back door for more and worse encroachment. Poisonous tech grifts thrive from creeping concessions and the erosion of boundaries, and any studio trying to make a case for plagiaristic AI is an accomplice to this endeavor. If you are too uncreative, too cheap, or too fucking lazy to put in the graft and make a videogame all by yourself, you should get the fuck out of my industry.
Embark has insisted that degenerative AI wasn’t used for any visual assets. Said assets are so painfully uncreative that I could easily believe otherwise.
ARC Raiders pushes freemium-style microtransactions because of course it does. Fortunately, the cosmetics on offer are barely better than the cosmetics you get from the outset, being about as painfully generic as sci-fi clobber can get. The whole game is almost impressive in how visually bland it is, and you can smell the desperation in the dreary outfits and backpacks and stupid dangly charms for sale.
Enjoyment can be finely sliced off of ARC Raiders like edible shreds from a doner kebab smeared in shit. That these slivers are entirely dependent on its players is hardly a triumph of the base experience, which is generally boring, flavorless, and lacking much of a point. If not for one intensely fragile hook, this is a sub-mundane peashooting box breacher that, despite a lack of originality or quality gameplay, still needed help from an algorithm.
