This is an extraction shooter, which means a game where players, either solo or in teams, embark on perilous expeditions into hostile territory and attempts to escape as unscathed as possible. Hideouts serve as temporary respite, where traders send the adventurers out on ARC Raiders BluePrints new missions for better gear.

Each mission is a variation of only a handful of quest types. You either find a thing to kill, an item to extract, or a piece of machinery to fix. It is busywork expanded into the gameplay loop entire. Where Arc Raiders comes out on top is presentation. This is one of the most beautiful games released this year. On a purely technical level, it reaches a level of immersion most never do.

Sadly, the pretty exterior carries the game only so far. Once you've seen the first ten or so hours of the gameplay, you've seen everything that Arc Raiders has to offer. At least for now, though the promised release calendar does little to indicate that anything will change dramatically in coming months.

But that's the problem with service titles such as this. Arc Raiders lives off the promise of what it can become one day. It is cut from the same cloth as Battlefield 6 in that it expects you to invest into potential that may never come to fruition.

In its current form, Arc Raiders is an undeniably enticing offering, but one that hits the walls of its genre and gameplay loop extremely quickly. It began life as a PVE player vs. environment - title and shifted into a PVPVE format when the developers realized how hard it would be to create new content for just a PVE title.

So, they took the path of least resistance and instead cultivated an environment that breeds toxicity. As of now, Arc Raiders suffers from the same root issue every other extraction shooter does: Its own players.

My best moments with Arc Raiders exist in spite of other players, not because of them. The world is a dizzying and immersive experience, where every single raid feels like a challenge. Even if the missions themselves are repetitive and shallow, it always feels like a joy to dive in and hope that a leaping robot spider doesn't chase us to our deaths.

Sadly, these excursions usually end with groups of angry young men ganging up on others, happily ignoring pleas to just let others enjoy the game on their own terms. Usually these moments are accompanied by slurs and toxic screaming on the voice chat, which is a sad necessity, as the limited pre-recorded dialog doesn't convey enough to buy ARC Raiders Weapons smooth these situations when they occur.