ARC Raiders: Overview and key features
Introduction to ARC Raiders
ARC Raiders is a cross-platform multiplayer co-op PvPvE extraction shooter played from a third-person perspective. The events take place in a harsh future on Earth, which is under attack by mysterious mechanical invaders called ARC — of various types and sizes. Stationed in the underground settlement of Speranza, Raiders venture to the surface to gather resources: from relics of the past to materials needed for development.
You can buy the PC version of the game on Steam. A Standard Edition and a Deluxe Edition with cosmetic upgrades are available.
Goal of the game: collect resources, defeat enemies (hostile ARC machines and real players) and make it out alive.
Platforms: Steam (PC), PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S. Full cross-play support; you can team up in squads regardless of platform. Cross-play can be disabled when you start matchmaking.
Release date and Russian language support
Russian language support in the game
ARC Raiders launched on Steam on October 30, 2025. A large number of players who fell in love with it back in beta were waiting for the full release. The game features full Russian language support. It is worth noting the fun localization as well. For example, the rooster who scavenges and hoards materials is called “Scrappy” in the English version, while in the Russian localization he is named «Плюшкин» (Plushkin), a direct reference to N. V. Gogol’s novel “Dead Souls”.
Standard Edition price by region:
- Russia — 3220 ₽
- Kazakhstan — 22 000₸
- USA — $39.99
- Europe — €39.99
The Deluxe Edition adds cosmetic items and 2,400 Raider Tokens.
The Deluxe Edition includes:
- Wanderer Cosmetic Pack (Valente Outfit);
- Pathfinder Backpack and Blanket Roll trinket;
- Cosmetic item “Lip Scar”, “Pew-pew” emoji, “Plushkin” outfit;
- 2,400 Raider Tokens.
Popularity and sales of ARC Raiders
The game very quickly won over the audience and received top scores — the title earned 94 points on OpenCritic and 87 points on Metacritic. ARC Raiders draws in players who always wanted to try an extraction shooter but were afraid of a high skill floor and complex gameplay. Users particularly highlighted the friendly community: players often team up in groups and squads to take down ARC, complete quests and farm resources.
Number one in Steam sales
Valve published a list of the top-selling games on Steam for the week from October 28 to November 4. First place by a wide margin went to ARC Raiders, which even surpassed Counter-Strike 2.
1.5 million copies in three days
According to analysts, in Steam alone more than one and a half million copies of the game were sold in the first three days after release. Yes, players showed genuine interest in the project as early as the beta test: at that stage, 200 thousand people were playing simultaneously, but no one predicted such a massive success.
Gameplay and mechanics
The core gameplay revolves around raids, and the game matches opponents based on your group type: if you play solo, you will only face solo players; if you queue as a party, you’ll only be matched against other parties. The maximum number of players in a squad is three. We don’t recommend queueing as a duo — playing against full trios will be noticeably harder. That said, it’s still fine to hop in just to farm resources or complete quests.
Raid duration is 30 minutes, and you can only join an active raid up to the 17-minute mark inclusive. In raids you will encounter both PvP opponents and PvE enemies.
ARC PvE enemies
ARC Raiders features many types of hostile ARC units: they roam the map, patrol high-risk zones, and each has its own aggression level and unique traits. Here’s how to read their behavior:
- White (bluish) scanner — “patrol” mode, completely safe for players.
- Yellow scanner — if an ARC hears noise or detects humans at range, the laser turns yellow and it switches to “alert” mode. If you manage to get out of its line of sight in time, you can avoid a confrontation.
- Red scanner — when an ARC enters “attack” or “aggression” mode, the laser turns red and the robot immediately engages.
Basic ARC
Оса (Wasp), Шершень (Hornet), Стукач (Snitch), Блоха (Tick), Пылесос (Pop), Огненный шар (Fireball), Turrets, Sentinel, Наблюдатель (Spotter) — they spawn in the same locations every raid and have predictable gameplay and behavior patterns. Dealing with them is fairly straightforward.
ARC bosses
Ракетчик (Rocketeer), Прыгун (Leaper), Королева (The Queen), Бомбардир (Bombardier).
We’ve prepared a few quick tips to help you win:
- Rocketeer can be brought down to the ground with a single Hornet driver: if you prevent him from taking off, you can finish him off with pretty much anything, even a hammer. You can keep him grounded with a Hornet driver as well, or just burst him down in time.
- Leaper deals damage with jumps and self-destructs, so overall he isn’t that dangerous if you damage him from cover: pull aggro from inside a building and shoot him from there — his tentacles are quite easy to shoot off.
- You can get into the bunker guarded by the Queen during the “Harvester” event quickly and safely with a zipline — it’s not that expensive. You can place it on a window: that way you also have a convenient escape route with your loot.
- Bombardier fires strictly by target lock, and if you destroy all of his “eye-trackers” in time, you and your teammates can take him down very quickly.
Whether you hunt for duels with opponents or try to ally with them to wipe out ARC is entirely up to you — that’s the beauty of this game.
Quest and skill system
ARC Raiders features a system of quests and skills that affect your character’s progression.
Quests are tasks given by vendors: collecting certain materials, small actions at key points of the map, exploring locations and repairing machines. For completing quests, you receive ammunition, grenades, tools and keys to locked areas.
Once you complete a quest, you always receive a reward. If you and your teammates share the same quest, as soon as one player completes it, it counts as completed for the entire group.
Skills are points you invest into your character’s main and additional stats. There are three branches:
- endurance — health, stamina;
- mobility — movement skills, speed;
- stealth — stealth-related skills.
We recommend leveling all three in parallel, while focusing primarily on endurance and mobility.
Exploration and survival
When leaving the underground settlement of Speranza for raids, you should keep several gameplay features in mind:
- Procedurally generated elements — loot, enemies and extraction points on each map vary from raid to raid.
- Random events — rain, sandstorms or the appearance of a radioactive zone that affects gameplay.
- Extraction system — calling an elevator for extraction attracts the attention of other players and bots, which creates tense situations.
To safely extract your loot, we recommend carrying a Raider Hatch Key: it allows you to leave quickly without drawing attention. Successfully completed raids grant experience used to upgrade your passive and active skills.
Building your arsenal and customization
After collecting your first materials in raids using free starter gear, your top priority should be building workbenches — they will later allow you to craft weapons, grenades, equipment and medical supplies.
You can customize your character with skins and emotes. The options are quite extensive. Many players and media outlets highlight this simplicity, flexibility and openness.
Reviews and critique of ARC Raiders
Player and critic reviews
“ARC Raiders feels like a turning point for the extraction-shooter genre. Arguably, it’s the first game that can genuinely appeal to a very broad audience with different tastes.
The developers ditched tedious mechanics in favor of dynamic, engaging gameplay and short sessions, topping it all off with a vibrant, believable universe and expressive visual style. Score: 9/10.”
“Arc Raiders is a special game. In the first week alone it gave us several of the best moments you could hope for: unexpected gameplay scenarios, incredible social interactions and a unique dynamic that’s impossible in any other video game.
The feeling is reminiscent of the early days of games like EverQuest, Halo, PUBG, DayZ or H1Z1; these are unique and wonderful experiments that marked a generational shift in the popularity of the genre.
Thanks to Arc Raiders we get the sense that we’re entering a new era of live-service multiplayer games where the focus is not on competitive minimalism and meta-build optimization, but on genuine human interaction and stories created by the community.”
Comparison with other games in the genre
The game most often compared to ARC Raiders is Escape From Tarkov — and it’s easy to see why: the games are indeed very similar in terms of gameplay and mechanics. At the same time, ARC Raiders introduces a number of changes that significantly lower the barrier to entry and make the game itself more engaging.
Players highlight the following key differences between ARC Raiders and similar games: more movement and traversal mechanics, a mix of ruined landscapes with a retrofuturistic style, incentives to cooperate with other players, a well-designed and much more entertaining PvE experience, the ability to fully and deeply customize your character, simple inventory management, straightforward resource and quest tracking, and the absence of “pay-to-win”.
Conclusion and the future of ARC Raiders
In our opinion, ARC Raiders is an excellent release that absolutely deserves the attention of a wider audience. Great optimization even for less capable PCs, interesting gameplay and well-thought-out mechanics make it easy to dive into its world and enjoy it. The future of the game depends not only on how warmly the player community has received the release, but also on the plans of the developers themselves.
Developer plans and updates
Embark Studio has big plans — and they’re not shy about sharing them. Two updates are scheduled for November and December 2025. They focus on new cosmetic items, a winter setting, fresh quests and challenges.
Community and esports
The player community itself creates diverse gameplay during sessions, and there is no built-in esports component in the game, since there isn’t always a single winner. A win is considered a successful raid where you manage to return to the settlement of Speranza. All teams can extract through the hatch without taking any damage at all.
How do you compete then? That question is still open: some suggest scoring based on the value of extracted loot, while others propose limiting extraction to a single surviving team.
ARC Raiders: system requirements
The game is well optimized and delivers a stable 60 FPS even on not-so-high-performance PCs. Almost anyone with a PC in general will be able to play. However, you should keep in mind that the game is built on Unreal Engine 5 — it’s heavy and demanding, and to truly enjoy the game with beautiful visuals and consistently high FPS, you need a high-performance PC.
| Minimum system requirements | |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 or newer (64-bit) |
| Processor | Intel Core i5-6600K or AMD Ryzen 5 1600 |
| Graphics card | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 580 or Intel Arc A380 |
| RAM | 12 GB |
| DirectX | Version 12 |
| Recommended system requirements | |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 or newer (64-bit) |
| Processor | Intel Core i5-9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 |
| Graphics card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT or Intel Arc B570 |
| RAM | 16 GB |
| DirectX | Version 12 |
| Epic settings | |
|---|---|
| Operating system | Windows 10 or newer (64-bit) |
| Processor | Intel Core i7-9700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X |
| Graphics card | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX |
| RAM | 16 GB |
| DirectX | Version 12 |
If your computer meets the system requirements but you still feel your FPS isn’t high enough, it’s worth considering an upgrade.
HYPERPC PC for ARC Raiders – December 2025
ARC Raiders demands a high-performance CPU, graphics card and sufficient RAM. HYPERPC PCs are built from cutting-edge components, fully tuned and stress-tested — you’ll get stable FPS and excellent image quality.
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