I’ve been enjoying Arc Raiders for over a week now, and my experience is probably familiar to fellow players: lots of looting, lots of “friendly don’t shoot”, and a whole lot of taking my marching orders from a goddamn chicken. Swear to god that thing needs stuffed and roasted.

The Arcs are one of the things that makes this work so well, and I’ve been on that learning curve of not taking them seriously enough, working out where to target, and occasionally getting in over my head and being stomped. One of the things I really like about the bots is their physicality, the way they can veer out of control when they lose a rotor or crash into elements of the landscape. And it turns out there’s one aspect of this that I’d completely missed.

You can ride the Arcs. I realise that some will have noticed this immediately, and I’m probably a dummy for playing so long without noticing, but you’re so rarely up-close with these things that it had just never occurred to me until a buddy did it by mistake with, I think, a wasp.

THIS WAS ACCIDENTAL, I DIDN’T KNOW YOU COULD DO THAT from r/ArcRaiders

It really is a neat option, with your raider capable of mantling onto the side of the smaller flying Arcs and then riding them (or if you prefer, you can get up there and melee them into the ground). There’s a custom animation for the raider keeping their balance atop the bot, and even behaviours tied to this: if you manage to somehow get on top of a rocketeer, it’ll flip in the air to try and throw you off.

There’s also a secret achievement tied to it, Death from Above, whereby you have to ride a rocketeer and do 50 damage to something (which can be the rocketeer itself). An easy way to do this is use a hornet drive to stun one, which’ll disable it for around ten seconds and give you time to clamber on up.

One more thing, which my esteemed PCG colleague Elie Gould pointed out when I was babbling on about riding Arcs: you can use the snap hook to snatch Arcs out of the sky, then slam 'em into the ground. Which maybe isn’t as cool as riding a rocketeer, but I’ll be trying it anyway.

Anyway: Arc Riders confirmed! And if you see someone flying around Spaceport like the Green Goblin tonight, be kind: I really am friendly.

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