MeinMMO editor Caro recently discovered ARC Raiders. She quickly noticed how much the game reminds her of another title that made her fall in love with video games over 10 years ago. And no other game has managed to evoke that feeling for her until now.
For about 3 weeks now, I regularly take some evening excursions to the robot-infested but really pretty surface in ARC Raiders. The game’s special atmosphere, especially through the environments, caught my eye quite early on. However, I am not really a regular shooter player, which is why I have resisted giving the game a chance for far too long.
Eventually, I succumbed – precisely because of a skin – and since then I have been able to realize how much I can lose myself in ARC Raiders. And it is not just because of the skin (I promise), but rather because a certain feeling has quickly arisen within me that I haven’t felt through a video game in over 10 years:
ARC Raiders transported me back to my favorite game, through which I fell completely in love with video games at the age of 13, namely The Last of Us.
A trivial feature in ARC Raiders became my favorite activity
I must admit that in ARC Raiders, I am particularly engaged by the rather “secondary” activities. Exploring, rummaging through all drawers and containers in buildings, and being excited about scrap are among my favorite activities in this extraction shooter.
It is precisely this calmer gaming experience, which might seem absolutely boring to other players and is regarded as a tedious necessity, that takes me back to 2014, when I was actually too young to have played The Last of Us so much.
The game by Naughty Dog is still very close to my heart. I scraped together my pocket money for The Last of Us and bought my first PlayStation, the PS4, only with 5 and 10 Euro bills. For a year, it was the only game I owned, and I was absolutely in love. In the game, but also in gaming in general. For this reason, I also dedicated my first tattoo to the game.
Today, 13 years later, I rummage through abandoned and run-down apartments as a Raider, just like I did back then as Joel, searching hospitals for bandages and occasionally being startled by terrible monsters. In The Last of Us, they were Clickers, while in ARC Raiders they are now the little sh*t Fireballs that catch me cold regularly.
Both games provide me the right balance between calm and action
Speaking of the ARCs: I both hate and love the machines. I even opt out of PvP because it’s not fun for me personally. Therefore, I mostly find myself in the so-called calm Care-Bear lobbies, where players tend to leave each other alone or fight together rather than against each other.
My true enemies are hence the various ARCs that aim for my poor, harmless Raider. By now, I don’t see myself as so harmless and I actually enjoy standing up against ARCs – even though in 80% of the fights, as a lone wolf, I get pretty riddled, burnt and fried by electric shocks.
Maybe I will reach a point someday when PvP becomes more interesting to me, but so far that’s not the case. I’m already having a great time and don’t see (yet) how hostile Raiders would improve that for me.
The variation of calm looting and simply enjoying the environments, along with the sudden dangers, strengthens this connection to The Last of Us that I have felt since I started in ARC Raiders.
Maybe my personal experience and opinion in ARC Raiders has to do with the fact that I have only played solo so far. If I were to travel to the surface as a duo or trio, it could tip that balance. The community feels the same: One player perfectly summarizes how different ARC Raiders is with friends: “Suddenly, every bush is suspicious”