I'm about to hit 70 hours in ARC Raiders and figured I would share some thoughts. I did write a Steam review of the game around the 50 hour mark:
It took me about 52 hours to finish all the quests in the game (up to cold snap's quests) and the first raider deck, so now I can probably fairly review ARC Raiders...
It's great! It's a very interesting game in all ways: the gameplay is somehow a pretty unique take on the extraction shooter despite not seeming to be one at first glance; the graphics are very good; the game is polished to hell and back with some real physicality to your character's movement that you don't see often in games (the body movement reminds me a bit of RDR2); the AUDIO, oh god, the audio, not only does it sound so good, but the design of the audio effects of the robot enemies is just so good, the positional and environment processing on VOIP in world is next level. There are SO many aspects of this game that are just insanely polished and elevate the game to AAAA status in my book.
At one point, I was so mad over getting killed by random people in solos that I thought I would never finish the quests and definitely never even try to do the Expedition stuff. But that was 20 hours ago, and once I learned to stop full on traipsing through the tulips and start being a little more distrustful of people, I started to keep a single loadout around a lot longer. Now, for want of any other goal, I am doing the expedition stuff, just farming garbage just to have an excuse to keep going topside.
I don't play trios ever because I don't really care for the PVP in this game. I don't really think the game is built for PVP unless you can no-life the game so that you have enough funds to make it feel easy to get new loadouts. If you go into PVP as a casual, even if you survive a team fight or two, your shield is going to break and then you're pretty much screwed. I guess you can bring in multiple shields if you're smart. I'm not smart. So I stick to solos where PVP is very rare and easily avoidable. In solos you are most likely to end up bonding with some other player who you will never see again, and that's another small part of the charm of this game that just feeds into the great atmosphere and environment. We're raiders, we're not really friends, but we're not enemies either; we're just a couple of strangers who met up for a few minutes topside and our interests aligned long enough for us to not shoot each other in the back (and what would be the point? we'd be fighting over scraps and garbage, who cares).
Anyway, this game is a trip. I can't believe I am sitting here itching to go back in just to sift through apartment buildings looking for candle holders and lightbulbs. At face value, that's ridiculous. But in practice, it's immensely satisfying.
Well, 20 more hours later, I got my lightbulbs and candle holders. I also ended up randomly grouping up with people to take down the Matriarch, which was quite the experience; I'm also about to finish upgrading all of my workbenches, which I definitely thought I would never do. The game has really impressed me with its ability to keep forcing me to move the goal posts on exactly when my disinterest in the game will reach its peak. I thought I was basically over the game 30 hours ago, but here I am, still wanting to go back in. I'm essentially just farming for the current event and the expedition, which I don't even care that much about, but the thinnest excuse to keep playing the game is all I really need, I think.
