I have over 1,000 hours beyond the Steam release. I recommend this game based on the philosophy behind what it’s trying to do in today’s MMO landscape. If you’re genuinely tired of Asian-style daily-task spam, rapid leveling, anti-social design, and the confused identity of pay-to-level or microtransaction-heavy MMOs, this game will likely be the best counterpoint you’ll find. It’s rough around the edges and made by a relatively small studio, but the foundation they’ve built is solid and workable.

This is a North American development team, and they care about aesthetic continuity. The game is an old-school, subscription-based sandbox MMO. They added a level 1–9 theme-park-style questing track simply because the early game was too confusing for most new players, but beyond that it opens into a true sandbox.

Right now, the game excels in its sandbox systems and crafting. They added a lot of early-game quality-of-life improvements about a month before the Steam release to support new players. The only major shortcomings at the moment are high-tier guild systems and end-game content, but there is still plenty of grinding and economy roleplay to keep you busy until you reach that point.

If you don’t mind that and want an MMO to play in the meantime, it’s worth a try. If you want a more fully developed endgame with richer worldbuilding, you should wait at least a year for it to progress further along its early-access roadmap.

Arc Raiders – 5.5/10

Arc Raiders is a decent game—an extraction shooter with not much to distinguish it on a macro scale. What sets it apart are its lore, production value, surprisingly strong AI for a multiplayer title, and its player-choice wipes. These are the areas it truly excels in.

The game’s third-person perspective will already rub some players the wrong way, and the gear management system has been simplified to reduce tedium. Unfortunately, what it gains in simplicity it loses in coherence. The tedium returns through an overabundance of materials and resources, all tied into a multi-rarity, hierarchical crafting system. Combine that with low backpack capacity, and you’ll find yourself overloaded within minutes of entering a round. The game constantly begs you to collect everything—and then some.

The Arcs (enemy NPCs) are semi-challenging and genuinely threatening, but also an extreme nuisance. Their tendency to rush toward gunfire and detect players from over 100 meters away undercuts the PvP tension. Instead of feeling like a raider, you often feel like prey being swarmed by overzealous sentinels.

Combat: The combat is fairly standard. Animations have been toned down to avoid overly mechanical, skill-heavy play. Slow rolling and awkward Unreal Engine hill-sliding are the best movement options available, while most encounters boil down to standard wall-hugging, third-person tactics. From a PC player’s perspective, when you slow all the animations down, combine it with a sluggish time-to-kill, and wrap it in a menu interface that feels like a console PowerPoint slideshow, it’s bound to irritate the more seasoned PC crowd.

My biggest complaints—and the reasons I don’t recommend it—are the overwhelming Arcs that disrupt PvP, the tedious, console-oriented menus, and the lack of meaningful progression. Much of the gathering feels like gathering for the sake of gathering. Everything you collect funnels into a web of craftable and upgradeable items that only appear to advance your progress. Ultimately, you pour your experience into a negligible tech tree, grinding to lvl 20 just to wipe and prestige for minor quality-of-life perks and a fresh start or get to lvl 75 for you to have innate, barely noticeable, perks.

Because of this, the PvP takes a backseat. The maps are fairly the same size, the looting is slow even with the maxed-out "looting speed" perk. And with the addition to flares when someone gets knocked, they want to alert people to 3rd party, but want the arcs to also punish rushed gameplay. So in many cases, the pvp turns into a never ending 3rd party mess, where even the amount of consumables you bring won't be enough regardless of the amount, and the killing of players isn't truly rewarded with good loot cause you're constantly being 3rd partied or bothered by the NPCs. In other words, a serious mult-faceted balancing problem is going on, no thanks to PvP taking a backseat for the PvE "immersion" they are trying to force on players.

This game was obviously sweating to release and they lacked the PvE content to cater to the dads and casual gamers. So much so that PvP was shoehorned into the game purely as a buffer for "please have something to do while we work on act II". Couple this with the idea that free loadouts have no cooldown and wipes are optional, you wonder if this is even an extraction shooter at all. The risk is so low and even if you chose to use all your resources, the chances of running into someone with nothing makes you wonder if its really worth it to use better gear. You can run solos with no risk and just hoard items with no potential wipe and there is a loot inflation problem where no one is risking anything. Essentially removing the "thrill" of PvP extraction where you gear up like a miniboss to find other people who are as rich as you. So I hope for the sake of the casual players, that they release content enough to keep them satiated as time rolls on.

Decent game, it copied so much of WoW, that I am wow'd myself. If they constantly update the dungeons and add classes and allow more freedom of expression, they can certainly have a good gameplay loop here.

The game has a difficulty ladder and of course you will get the sweaties as you move up. I don't care about toxicity in a game as casual as this in a ladder, but I know a lot of people will hate it.

The only biggest problem (and my negative review as of October 2025) I have with the game is the lack of visual indicators and interface management. I'm not a WoW player at all, maybe people who are so used to WoW they will find it easy. I hate the monotonous clutter, the health bars, the lack of dispel and Aoe indicators and everything else. It's purely just sound and small visual indicators with no animations in a sea of cartoonish digital vibrance colors that I feel I'm playing the game on an ipad with no difference in hue in the backdrop.

Other than that, it definitely has a decent loop and I can see more games like this to come.

So essentially, This game is the basic base-building of Rust, your normal survival-game Unreal Engine 4 shooting mechanics (with lean) and scattered bare bones events around the map like Xera:Survival or Warz. So almost everything from Rust is replicated for the basic building. But instead of crafting everything, you only craft the basic stuff and the higher end stuff is from getting "tradeable / not crafting" items and sell them to traders around the map. So Safe Zones like many other games or outposts like Rust. You level up your Rep to unlock the potential to buy really expensive guns and armor.

So the game play loop for this game is get base, upgrade, then sell, trade, buy, raid, rinse, wash, repeat. I just prefer this over Rust cause the ASWD left hand movement is better and the gunplay is more satisfying (vaulting mechanic, lean, prone, and ED, QA simultaneous movement). There is also scheduled raid base immunity built into the game. Slightly Less upkeep crafting and base-hoarding, more action getting rich to get looted.

Take this information as you will. My only gripes about the game really is that the devs didn't put much time into keyboard inputs and other QoL stuff after 5+ years of development. Items still don't stack properly, the dragging & dropping is atrocious, there is barely any action queuing (shift cancels reload, can't hold shift and lean even though you're crouching still and not sprinting), and you can't drive through pretty much anything. small trees, guardrails, small wood fences, everything will stop the car and water immedietely blows up cars too with chokepoints bridges being forced to be used.