Review
ARC Raiders
Tarkov's tension without Tarkov's cruelty, and the most interesting social design in any shooter right now.
No. 43 in The Noteworthy 50 · Shooter
The Finals
The most destructible shooter ever built — every wall, floor and building is a tactical option or a way to die.
The Finals' pitch is that everything is destructible, and unlike almost every shooter making that claim, it means it. Buildings collapse structurally. A heavy player with explosives can remove the floor beneath a defending team and drop them three storeys. Goo grenades build temporary cover. Fights redraw the map as they happen, and no two rounds on the same arena are the same shape.
The objective design amplifies it. Teams extract cashboxes to terminals, and the extraction takes time — which means every cashout is a fixed point that all three teams converge on, with the surrounding structure as ammunition. It solves the problem of shooters where teams avoid each other, by giving everyone a reason to be in the same collapsing building at once.
Class identity
Light, Medium and Heavy are genuinely different games. Light is a fast flanker with low health and an invisibility cloak; Heavy is a wall of hit points with a mesh shield and a sledgehammer that removes architecture. Balance between them has been the studio's ongoing struggle and has swung more than once, but the identities are clear and the loadout system supports real experimentation.
Why is it not higher? Audience. The Finals never converted its excellent launch into the scale of Warzone or Apex, and a shooter's health is partly a function of its matchmaking pool. The population is stable and Embark has continued shipping seasons. It deserves more players than it has, and it is free, so there is no reason not to be one of them.
What works
- Full structural destruction — buildings genuinely collapse and reshape fights
- Three body classes create real, meaningful loadout identity
- The cashout objective structure produces constant three-way chaos
- Movement and gunplay are crisp and distinctly its own
What doesn't
- The playerbase is healthy but smaller than the design merits
- Balance between light, medium and heavy has swung repeatedly
- Destruction can produce genuinely unreadable moments
- The game-show framing is divisive and the announcers wear thin
The Catch — what it will cost you
Free with a cosmetics-only store and a battle pass. Embark has held that line since 2023 without introducing power purchases, which is a genuinely good record and part of why ARC Raiders earned trust on arrival.
Who it's for: Trios who want a shooter where the map itself is the primary weapon.
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