ARC Raiders

ARC Raiders is an extraction shooter played from a third-person perspective. g. Hidden Bunker and Locked Gate. During the raid they will encounter hostile NPC robots (known as "ARC"), along with other human players.

When a player is killed, they will lose any equipment and materials they have collected, except loot stored in a safe pocket, and return to base. Players can escape via extraction elevators, metro stations and air shafts or use raider hatches (safer extraction points that require keys to be opened) to return to base when they are done collecting loot.

ARC Raiders takes place on Earth in the year 2180. Decades earlier, hostile machines of unknown origin, called "ARC" after the telltale shape of their radar signatures, descended from outer space and began attacking humanity. After years of warfare, surviving humans were forced underground to avoid extermination, using the surface to collect resources that can be sold, dismantled or used to craft gear. One human safe haven is Toledo, a makeshift subterranean city that consists of a network of autonomous communities or "contradas" located beneath a region known as the Rust Belt in post-apocalyptic Italy (although the game's world map is based upon real-life Tenerife).

The player is a "raider" from Speranza, one of Toledo's contradas. Raiders are individuals who voluntarily go above ground, referred to as "Topside", during periods of low ARC activity in order to scavenge resources, such as goods from the old world and components from downed ARC machines, to sell, trade, and keep Speranza functioning. Although raiders are encouraged to cooperate, raiding is unregulated and some raiders choose to hunt and steal from each other.

ARC Raiders is developed by The Finals developer Embark Studios. It is produced by Aleksander Grøndal. Nexon, Embark Studios' parent company, performed market analysis for Steam prior to release and determined policies for how to maintain the userbase.

The game was officially announced at The Game Awards 2021 as a free-to-play "cooperative third-person shooter". It was revealed in 2023 that the genre of the game had been changed to a PvPvE extraction shooter. Later in 2023 Embark launched a first playtest in the form of a closed Alpha with strict NDA. The game uses Unreal Engine 5.

ARC Raiders received "generally favorable" reviews according to review aggregator website Metacritic Review aggregator OpenCritic reported that 92% of critics recommend the game.

Destructoid's Scott Duwe called the game "simultaneously one of the most technically impressive games of 2025 and one that genre veterans and newbies alike can find a ton of fun in." Alex Van Aken review on Game Informer concluded that "Despite my misgivings, I hold the human-made experience of Arc Raiders in high regard. Its creators have made an intriguing world full of curiosities and payoffs. Nearly every match yields a memorable sequence: an unexpected encounter, a dramatic escape, a hilarious interaction, or a tragic end.