ARC Raiders review: A contender for game of the year

An extraction shooter for the masses - that’s the simplest way to sum up ARC Raiders from Embark Studios. While other games in this genre, such as Escape from Tarkov, have struggled to break into the mainstream - likely due to their steep learning curves and limited accessibility - ARC Raiders manages to get almost everything right, making it inviting for a broad audience.

We thoroughly enjoyed our time with this third-person title and immediately wanted to keep playing. Much of that comes down to its gripping introduction - both the cinematic opening and the tutorial - packed with atmosphere and clear explanations of the game’s core systems. The first few matches are incredibly intense, sparking curiosity about the unique, immersive world while raising your pulse with tense encounters against both humans and machines. Smooth, responsive controls and stylish animations add to the excellent sense of movement. Long-term engagement feels almost guaranteed, thanks to the satisfying mix of loot and crafting systems, engaging quests, and a deep skill tree that rewards continued play.

The game’s visual style deserves real credit - it blends natural landscapes with modern industrial and technological elements in a remarkably cohesive way. The clean, futuristic design also stands out as a major plus. We did encounter a few bugs during testing, particularly when changing the resolution, which sometimes caused the HUD to scale incorrectly. It’s also a bit disappointing that certain objects or effects, like shadows, occasionally pop in regardless of the chosen settings. Still, ARC Raiders showcases one of the most stable and visually impressive implementations of Unreal Engine 5 to date.

Performance is excellent, and the game is surprisingly compact, with a download size of about 27 GB (as of November 3, 2025). That said, startup times could use some optimization. On the bright side, shader preloading is noticeably shorter than in many other UE5-based titles.

The team behind ARC Raiders also deserves credit for its extensive options menu, which conveniently applies most changes instantly - no restart required. Many developers could learn a thing or two from the game’s clear, detailed explanations of each setting. As expected, this shooter supports a full suite of modern graphical features, including frame generation, ray tracing, and various upscaling technologies. Alongside TAAU and TSR, ARC Raiders also supports DLSS, XeSS, and FSR.

The only slightly puzzling aspect is the inclusion of three separate resolution controls (see screenshots) - a bit of overkill that could easily confuse players.

The different graphic presets primarily affect draw distance - especially level of detail and vegetation density - as shown in our comparison images. Texture quality remains impressive even on the lowest preset, but you’ll definitely want to enable anti-aliasing. Without it, many elements in the scene, like the protagonist’s hair, tend to flicker noticeably.

The so-called practice range serves as our benchmark sequence, accessible after completing four matches. During testing, we sprinted in a straight line down a street in the outdoor area for about 20 seconds—until the character ran out of stamina (see video). Unlike real matches, which lack a fixed starting point, this method provides consistent, reproducible results.

As mentioned earlier, the hardware requirements for an Unreal Engine 5 title are surprisingly moderate. While weaker iGPUs - like the Radeon 820M - struggle to reach playable performance at 1,920 × 1,080 resolution on minimal settings without upscaling, mid-range GPUs such as the GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop handle the game smoothly at maximum settings, delivering nearly 60 FPS in Full HD - with full ray tracing enabled, no less.

You don’t need a high-end GPU to enjoy ARC Raiders in QHD either. An RTX 4060 Laptop delivers solid frame rates here as well, hitting roughly 60 FPS at 2,560 × 1,440 with the Epic preset when using DLSS on Quality mode.

You’ll only need a top-tier GPU if you plan to play in 4K without upscaling. For 3,840 × 2,160 resolution with maximum settings and ray tracing enabled, we recommend at least a mobile GeForce RTX 5080. With DLSS set to Quality, that GPU breaks the 60 FPS barrier in our benchmark.

As expected, additional performance gains can be achieved through Frame Generation. Using the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 laptop GPUs as examples, we analyzed the resulting frame rate improvements. As always, the perceived smoothness of Frame Generation doesn’t perfectly match the measured FPS numbers. However, in ARC Raiders, the overall image felt noticeably smoother than in many other titles with Frame Gen enabled.

Because gaming benchmarks are time-consuming and sometimes delayed by activation restrictions, we can only include a limited number of results at the time of publication. Additional GPU benchmarks will be added later.