From Clair Obscur and Balatro to Undertale and Stardew Valley – the history of gaming knows countless examples of titles that appeared seemingly out of nowhere and went on to become massive successes and certified hood classics.
The latest example one could put into this category is undeniably Embark Studios’ ARC Raiders, an extraction shooter that could.
In less than two weeks, ARC has seemingly captured the attention of the entire gaming community, earning solid 8-9/10 review scores, attracting over 462,000 players on Steam alone at its peak, and even helping improve Unreal Engine 5’s reputation by proving that most of the performance issues many have come to associate with it come from developers’ implementation of UE5 rather than the engine itself.
That’s why many were surprised to see one gaming outlet, Eurogamer, sticking out from the cheering crowd with the peculiar 2/5 score it awarded ARC Raiders with, citing “one inexcusable decision” as the reason for the low rating – the developer’s “continued use of AI voice generation.”