I Already Regret Playing ARC Raiders Solo

ARC Raiders wasn’t a game I had on my radar for much of 2025 and only really caught my attention in the last month or so. I hadn’t played an extraction shooter prior to ARC Raiders, mostly because none of my friends played the genre, so hearing that the game was very solo player-friendly suddenly had me intrigued. While I’m loving ARC Raiders so far and think it’s the perfect introduction to the extraction shooter genre for a first-time player like myself, I am starting to regret playing it solo for one major reason.

The threat of losing all the loot you’ve found during a match makes the high-risk, high-reward gameplay of extraction shooters like ARC Raiders exhilarating. And the community interactions I’ve gotten to experience as a solo player have been a mix of friendly exchanges and tense combat encounters, leaving me feeling like I’m getting a well-rounded experience. However, I still think I would prefer playing the game with a squad of buddies, at least initially, since playing solo exacerbates the isolated feeling of entering the Rust Belt and leaves me feeling incredibly vulnerable without teammates to watch my back.

Playing ARC Raiders Without a Squad Had Me Jumping at Shadows

Without any prior extraction shooter experience to go off, I played my first few matches of ARC Raiders very cautiously. My only real goals were to find some loot, maybe complete the initial quests, and extract to get back to the safety of Speranza without getting myself killed. To this end, every encounter I had—both with other Raiders and ARCs—had the intensity of a horror game, more so than the types of shooters I was used to.

Since I hadn’t played in any of the past ARC Raiders playtests, like the pre-release server slam, I didn’t really know how frequently I would encounter hostile players or how easy it would be for enemy ARCs to spot me. While the launch-day meta for ARC Raiders saw players using pretty basic weapons like the Rattler and the Ferro, it took me a while to grasp what the time-to-kill was for particular weapons and how quickly I’d be able to escape and heal myself. Not having a squad to back me up meant that I was alone in trying to learn these aspects of the game, which meant gameplay could get particularly intense in a way I wasn’t prepared for.

ARC Raiders’ Sound Design Heightened My Paranoia

By far the most fear-inducing part of ARC Raiders is the sound design that makes it feel like every action you take alerts the entire area to your position. I spent most of my first few matches perpetually crouching for fear that my footsteps were too loud. I can imagine having a squad with you grants some kind of security when it comes to noise level, since you can have teammates on the lookout while you breach and search an ARC Raiders stash. Without a team behind me, I often felt like I was going crazy, getting jumpscared by the odd tumbleweed or even the sound of my own footsteps.

Solo ARC Raiders Was the Scariest Game I Played on Halloween

Like I’m sure many others, I spent my Halloween playing games while handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. This Halloween, I enjoyed playing some:

• Silent Hill f
• Look Outside
• No, I’m Not a Human
• ARC Raiders

Obviously, ARC Raiders is the outlier here, but I was too addicted to the game to not play it a little among the spooky selections for the evening. It’s not a horror game in the traditional sense, but trying to survive in ARC Raiders was still by far the scariest experience I had that night.

Playing with the lights off and trekking through the dark basements of buildings on the Buried City map, only to constantly have the feeling of being watched and questioning whether I was really hearing footsteps or just imagining it, was more tense than any feeling I’ve felt from a horror game in a long time. At one point, I nearly had a panic attack when a Tick unexpectedly jumped on my character’s head, and I quickly had to react to the button prompt to shake it off. If I had been playing with a squad, at least I could chat with my buddies to keep my sanity, but as a solo experience, it was horrifying to say the least.

Released

October 30, 2025

ESRB

Teen / Violence, Blood