Arc Raiders Review: The Extraction Shooter That Finally Got It Right

Arc Raiders review: Embark Studios’ long-anticipated extraction shooter finally delivers the genre-defining experience players have been waiting for. With precise gunplay, steady tension, and a surprisingly generous progression loop, it feels like the first title in years to marry intensity with polish — though its AI voice acting still lingers as the one element holding back its world from full immersion.

After a wave of criticism targeting major media reviews of Arc Raiders, IGN has rolled out its definitive take — one that stands apart in tone and precision. The conversation surrounding the game hasn’t been limited to its mechanics. Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney recently stepped into the fray, defending the use of AI-generated voices in Arc Raiders as an “opportunity” rather than a threat to performers.

Against this backdrop, IGN’s review by Travis Northup focuses on the game itself — its movement, risk, and reward — as the true measure of Arc Raiders’ achievement.

Northup’s verdict, published by IGN, anchors this piece. Across his detailed review, he finds that Arc Raiders is “the most hooked I’ve found myself on an extraction shooter,” emphasizing that even after fifty hours, the experience remains fresh and compulsive. That claim alone sets a striking tone: for a genre crowded with uneven entries and abandoned prototypes, this one feels alive. “After years of promising but uneven attempts,” he writes, “Arc Raiders feels like the first to fully realize this genre’s potential, and has set a new standard for it in the process.”

The structure of Arc Raiders is instantly familiar — drop into a hostile zone, gather loot, fight or avoid rival crews, and extract before death strips you of everything. But where most extraction shooters falter in pacing or technical finesse, Embark Studios finds a rare balance. Weapons feel deliberate. Ammunition is limited. Reload times stretch nerves thin. Combat against AI-controlled drones and towering automatons isn’t chaotic but surgical, emphasizing vulnerability as much as firepower. Every encounter can tip the scale from triumph to ruin in seconds. Northup notes that even small exchanges pulse with “delightful anxiety,” the game forcing players to decide whether to fight, hide, or gamble their entire haul.

Perhaps more surprising is Arc Raiders’ community. While the extraction genre is infamous for hostility and griefing, early sessions have shown an unexpected civility among players. Northup describes running into strangers who chose to cooperate instead of kill — moments of humanity within a design that otherwise thrives on mistrust. “I’m genuinely shocked by how nice much of the community has been,” he says. The remark carries weight precisely because it’s so rare in this context. For now, the atmosphere remains optimistic, though history suggests such goodwill may fade as the meta hardens and competition sharpens.

The player’s sense of risk remains constant, but the sting of loss is softened by design. When gear is lost — either to rival players, environmental glitches, or one’s own missteps — the game offers fallback loadouts strong enough to regain footing. Its economy encourages recovery rather than punishment: crafting, upgrading, and trading keep momentum alive. This, Northup argues, is what separates Arc Raiders from the punishing loops of Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown.

“Its incredibly well-designed progression makes every match an opportunity for forward momentum,” he writes.

Even failure feeds into progress, ensuring that the grind never collapses into futility.

Technically, Arc Raiders holds up. On both PC and Xbox Series X, performance remains solid — a rare achievement for a game this visually dense. The environments are striking: vast zones shaped by ruin, sand, and industrial decay. Each of the four current maps carries its own rhythm, from the submerged echo of the Dam Battlegrounds to the dry menace of the Buried City. Every structure hides opportunity or ambush. Over time, familiarity sets in, but exploration remains rewarding through hidden caches, locked rooms, and secrets that require specific keys or knowledge to reach.

Still, Embark’s world isn’t seamless. Northup recounts moments when his character became trapped in geometry or fell to death through a ladder bug — small technical fissures that matter more when every lost weapon represents hours of progress. Yet he also acknowledges their rarity, counting such moments “on one hand” across fifty hours of play. For a genre defined by stakes, even isolated bugs can spark rage, but in this case, they remain exceptions to the rule of stability.

Combat against human players defines the upper layer of tension. PvP matches outside the solo queue are faster, meaner, and less forgiving — where dodge-rolls, grenades, and high-end weapons create some of the most kinetic gunfights seen in a live-service shooter. Northup highlights his attachment to specific tools, such as the Torrente LMG or Wolfpack grenades that send homing missiles across the battlefield, translating each victory and loss into something tactile.

“It might not have the mechanical crispness of Remnant 2 or Gears of War,” he admits, “but it’s leagues above what we’ve seen in a live-service extraction game.”

The game’s AI opponents, though visually impressive and aggressive in numbers, sometimes lack strategic intelligence. Drones that swarm and mark targets can terrify early on, but their behavior grows predictable once patterns are learned. Larger machines can lose track of players or get stuck mid-chase. Even so, coordinated encounters — particularly with elite robots like the Queen — deliver the kind of large-scale combat moments the genre rarely achieves. They transform the game’s wastelands into battlefields of shifting fire and metallic fury, even when AI quirks undercut immersion.

Progression remains the heart of Arc Raiders’ appeal. The interlocking systems — quest chains, XP trees, crafting, weekly trials, and prestige resets — create overlapping incentives that turn every session into measurable growth. Northup notes that the story itself barely registers; what lore exists trickles through vendor dialogue and mission snippets, delivered in the flat cadence of AI-generated voices. This choice, controversial in its own right, underscores the tension between technological ambition and emotional authenticity. The post-apocalyptic setting, with its ruined surface and mechanical invaders, carries promise but lacks the narrative texture to elevate it. In a review otherwise filled with praise, Northup’s dismissal of the story as “basically a waste of time” cuts sharply.

That limitation speaks to the broader discussion Sweeney reignited. For critics, the AI voices strip the world of personality; for technologists like Sweeney, they hint at a future where performance can scale infinitely without replacing the human element. His defense framed the use of AI not as erasure but amplification, a tool that could, in his words, “expand creative possibilities.” Still, the flatness that Northup hears in Arc Raiders’ NPC dialogue is the clearest example of how that vision remains unrealized. The writing and delivery feel disconnected — another system rather than a soul.

What Embark Studios accomplishes, however, outweighs its shortcomings. In a market crowded with iterative shooters, Arc Raiders arrives as something decisive — confident without noise, balanced without blandness. It finds rhythm in scarcity, turning each reload, each encounter, into drama. The game rewards improvisation, patience, and greed in equal measure. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s what the genre needed: a standard, not a prototype.