2.5/5 ★ – Hazzi's review of ARC Raiders.

ARC Raiders: The Co-op Game That Forgot About Co-op Arc Raiders looks and sounds amazing, but the actual experience gets frustrating fast. The game expects you to sweat every match. If you try to play casually or solo, you get wiped and pushed back into weak free loadouts while stacked squads farm you. There is no room for relaxed play at all. Progression feels pointless. You spend hours farming mats, upgrading stations or finally crafting a strong weapon, and the moment you take it out, you are risking losing it to campers, third parties or even your own team refusing to res you just to get your sweet loot! People are right when they say they grind for hours, finally get a good gun, take it topside once and end up losing it before they had a chance to use it. The game makes you scared to use the loot you earn. The stash system is constant housekeeping. The space you get can be upgraded, but item stacks are so small that you are always forced to sell or recycle things. Then the next mission asks for the exact item you just dumped. Most missions are just collecting junk or pressing buttons, so your stash fills with items you are never sure you should keep. The worst part is how often you get punished for other people’s mistakes, and the general player behavior only makes it worse. I’ve had runs where we hit a good loot room full of heavy epic gear, I call danger early and start moving, but my teammate is busy dropping items because they can’t decide what loot to drop. By the time they start moving, I’m already fighting a duo alone. They run off and extract themselves without helping. People leave teammates to bleed out to steal their gear, ignore revives and extract alone because selfish play is more rewarding than teamwork. You can do everything right and still die because someone else played badly — and you can’t rely on randoms, sometimes not even on your own squad. On top of that, basic interactions like doors, ladders and ziplines are unreliable. You often have to reposition multiple times just to get the prompt to show up. In combat this means instant death. I tried to escape on a zipline and the game simply refused to register it until it was too late. There’s also a glitch that lets players enter high-tier locked rooms without keys, and it’s all over YouTube. Tons of people abuse it, grabbing top-tier loot effortlessly while anyone playing fair falls even further behind. The developers have acknowledged the issue, but have done nothing to fix it... Arc Raiders has great fundamentals, but the surrounding systems constantly erase your progress and reward selfish, opportunistic play. The gameplay is good, but the loop becomes stressful, repetitive and unrewarding. Right now it feels like you lose more than you gain. 5/10