Two weeks ago, I had a minor interest in the new game from Embark Studios. Fast forward to the middle of November, and Arc Raiders has quickly become one of my favorite multiplayer experiences ever.

That might sound like hyperbole, but this excellently crafted world with near-perfect sound design, very fun action, and the ability to make every moment feel like a movie has truly elevated Arc Raiders as one of the best PS5 games.

2025 is one of the best years for video game releases in recent memory, from incredibly thought-provoking and beautiful experiences like Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the gorgeous hand-crafted world of Team Cherry’s Hollow Knight: Silksong, or the chaotic fun of Donkey Kong Bananza.

In a year where it’s almost impossible to select a shortlist for Game of the Year at the upcoming Game Awards, I’m absolutely shocked to say that an extraction shooter stands above the rest, and truly warrants your attention.

A world worth climbing up to

If you’ve not heard of Arc Raiders yet, it’s a new multiplayer PvPvE (player versus player versus environment) game from the developers of the hugely popular game-show style first-person shooter, The Finals.

On paper, Arc Raiders is an extraction shooter, an increasingly popular video game genre pioneered by titles like Escape from Tarkov and Hunt: Showdown. The difference is that, while extraction shooters pride themselves on unforgiving gameplay (die and you lose everything you’ve looted during your session), Arc Raiders captures the widespread appeal and console player base that few, if any, of the genre have been able to.

The premise is simple: Earth has fallen to an alien mechanical force called the Arc, pushing humanity underground. As a raider, you need to venture “Topside” to salvage materials amongst rusted towns and shattered highways, and lands inhabited by very dangerous drone-esque robots.

Arc Raiders thrives in its atmosphere. I’ve been playing the game on PS5 Pro in my living room with a soundbar and on my gaming PC connected to open-ear headphones; in both environments, the game grabs all my attention - the world design is just absolutely ace.

Whether you’re hearing other players get attacked by drones across the map, the sound of car alarms going off in the near distance, or slowly crouching through claustrophobic corridors, Arc Raiders makes you feel part of the world, and because of that, the last thing you want to do is die.

It’s ok to be alone

My biggest worry with online multiplayer games is feeling excluded because, as I grow older, I have fewer and fewer friends who want to team up after a long day at work for some intense online shooter action. In fact, the older I get, the more I avoid multiplayer games altogether, opting for tranquility and emotional connection with story-driven games instead of the thrill from explosions and gunshots.

But Arc Raiders is different; it tries to match solo players with other solo adventurers, and the instilled fear from the AI means other players are often more valuable alive than if you were to choose to kill them. On my first adventure as a solo raider, I experienced the magic of the game and instantly knew I would fall in love with it.

Crawling around corners in Dam Battlegrounds, one of the four maps at launch (each has different events that cycle throughout the day, and evening raids that make things feel more like a horror movie than a heist adventure), I could hear players conversing through the game’s proximity chat.

As soon as I popped my head out, one guy screamed, “FRIENDLY? ARE YOU FRIENDLY?” I paused, frantically looked for the button to toggle my microphone, and just before he started to shoot, I screamed back, “DON’T SHOOT, I’M NICE”.

Both players, who had just met each other in the game mere minutes before I arrived, were super friendly, insisting we team up and help each other find rare weapons and other essential materials to kick-start our Arc Raiders journey.

As we breached containers, opened lockers, and fought enemies ranging from robotic spiders to loud Snitches that alert other Arc to your location, we stumbled on a fourth player. “FRIENDLY? ARE YOU FRIENDLY?” my newfound friend screamed again. No sound, but the player standing in front of us, like a criminal on trial, nodded their head and started to jump on the spot.

In the midst of the commotion, the other player we’d been exploring with unmuted their mic and said “NO VOICE? NO LIKE!” and started spraying bullets into the mute custodian. In a split second, I had decided I wanted to instill humanity and fairness into my Arc Raiders experience and gunned down my comrade, protecting the microphone-less player and choosing fairness over all.

My friend turned foe said, “I didn’t hear them speak, but I’ll die a warrior’s death. I love you all, goodbye.” In that moment, I punched them in the face, knocking them out for good, and I never played with them again. If any moment needed to convince me that Arc Raiders was special, it was that, and from there I made sure to tell every single one of my friends to fork out the cash and join me Topside.

The best heist movie ever. Every single time

The best thing about the anecdote I just shared is that if you were to ask any one of the 4 million plus people who have purchased and played Arc Raiders for a similar moment, they’ll all have their own stories.

From dancing in a group, being betrayed by your best friend you only met for the first time 23 minutes ago, or crawling to an extraction point to make it back to safety with your last dying breath, every single time you play Arc Raiders, there’s a new plotline and new chapter added to the story.

Arc Raiders is one of those special moments in multiplayer video game history. It feels like the Fortnite moment for extraction shooters, where a more accessible product captures the hearts of a mainstream audience, and we all start to wonder how we managed without it.

Back in 2017, Fortnite took over the world, and for many, many people, we all remember the first time experiencing the cartoon battle royale. Whether you love or hate Fortnite, its impact cannot be understated, but before its existence, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds was already offering an excellent battle royale experience.

The same could be said for Arc Raiders, while other extraction shooters offer more intense combat, more unforgiving repercussions, and a higher skill level, none provide the polished experience that Embark has created here. Many of my friends who are casual gamers or even those, like me, who love video games but are sick and tired of online multiplayer, have all fallen in love with Arc Raiders. And, best of all, every single one has a blast playing solo or in a squad.

You don’t need friends who play video games to get the most out of Arc Raiders, if anything, the most impactful moments I’ve experienced have come from solo play, from meeting random looters and teaming up, from fighting dangerous robots, and from getting betrayed by the people who claim their friendly but rob your dead body after attacking when you least expect it.

Arc Raiders has well and truly rekindled my love for multiplayer video games, and after 60 hours, I’m still itching to play more. The gameplay loop just hits the spot; you don’t want to die, but you want to take the risk for the big reward. Rinse and repeat.

If you’ve not played Arc Raiders yet, this review is your sign to get on board. Embark is a studio that listens and respects its players, and because of this, there’s a thriving community growing around this game.

Arc Raiders will get even better with time, and Embark has promised years of content updates to keep the gameplay fresh. After the beta, I wasn’t sold, purely because extraction shooters need to make a player fear the loss of equipment, and with the knowledge that nothing would carry over to the main game, I kind of just didn’t care. That said, after playing the full game for two weeks, Arc Raiders is now my vote for 2025’s game of the year, and I’m honestly shocked that I’m even thinking that.

2025 will go down as one of the best years ever for video games, and what better way to cap it off than with a multiplayer game for the ages, engulfing what made us fall in love with gaming in the first place: The ability to capture our imaginations.

Should you play Arc Raiders?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

Accessibility

Arc Raiders is filled with accessibility features to set the game up exactly as you want it. With multiple control schemes and basic controller remapping, there are different ways to play depending on your needs and preferences. You're able to change your gun's crosshair and color to make sure that you get the best experience for your needs.

Voice chat is quite an important aspect of Arc Raiders; however, if you don't want people to hear you speak, you can opt to mask your voice using one of Embark's AI-powered filters. There are also options for multiple text sizes as well as options to help those who are colorblind.

How I reviewed Arc Raiders

I played over 60 hours of Arc Raiders on PS5 Pro connected to my Samsung S90D, one of the best OLED TVs, as well as on an Nvidia RTX 5090-powered gaming PC connected to a Samsung OLED gaming monitor. Both experiences have been truly excellent, with near-perfect performance regardless of your hardware. Graphical fidelity and frame rate are the only differences I noticed when playing on my high-end rig, but I didn't feel like the PS5 version was a slouch by any means.

I tested Arc Raiders solo, with a friend, and in a group of three. At launch, I had some very minor disconnection issues, but this appears to be fully rectified at the time of writing. I used the microphone on the PS5 DualSense Controller as well as my Sennheiser HD490 Pro open-ear headphones connected to a Fosi K7 DAC.

I've played a whole host of multiplayer shooters over the years. While I'm a novice to extraction shooter video games, I've done my research and watched lots of gameplay to understand the genre.

First reviewed November 2025

Harkening back to the golden age of the eerie indie horror boom in the mid-2010s, Little Nightmares 3 is a puzzle platforming adventure that sees one of the era’s most successful franchises return to our screens, but this time under new management.

Although the first two games were developed by Tarsier Studios, Little Nightmares 3 is the first to be developed by Supermassive Games instead, and it unfortunately shows. Finding your footing with a new IP is one thing, but building on one with a dedicated following makes for a challenge that Supermassive just couldn’t face.

The tell-tale sign is how similar Little Nightmares 3 is to its predecessors, and in that it lacks originality. Puzzles are repetitive and often overly simplistic, and many of the mechanics added to the game feel underutilized and can even affect the pacing. That’s especially true if you’re playing single player.

Rather than any true innovation, Little Nightmares 3 is Supermassive adding co-op, dusting off its hands, and serving you an uninventive, repetitive rehash of the older games.

This sounds harsh, but there is still some good in what’s been taken from the previous entries; it’s still plenty atmospheric, delivering gorgeously haunting visuals and sound design, as well as some great (albeit sparingly few) moments of tension and excitement. It just lacks a lot of the same creativity and represents a missed opportunity to do something new.

On the road to nowhere

Little Nightmares 3 has players plunging once again into the gloomy liminal space between sleeping and waking, this time with two new protagonists: Low and Alone. These two can be played in online co-op (though frustratingly, not local co-op), or you can pick one of the two to lead through the adventure solo.

But what does this look like in practice? In short, a lot of running, climbing, and unending tunnels to crawl through. At times, Little Nightmares 3 can be likened to a trick question in a school exam. Puzzles are broadly pretty easy and repetitive, and there were several times I was entirely stuck just because I was looking for more complicated answers to my problems.

Once in a while, that’s fine; and many games cleverly play on that experience, but here it just feels lazy and uninspired. Very few moments offer any real challenge, and while I’ve never found Little Nightmares puzzles particularly difficult, it takes the first three of the game’s four acts before a puzzle genuinely makes me stop to think.

It’s especially frustrating that it takes so long to bring the heat, given how short the game is, too. With only four acts and the first two feeling especially brief, I’d have hoped to see as many rooms as possible brimming with obstacles, scares, and action, but the vast majority just involve pushing and or mounting a box, pulling a switch, or opening a hatch and pootling along to the next room for more of the same.

This slow pace is doubly frustrating in single-player mode, wherein you spend a fair chunk of time waiting for your companion to catch up and join you in moving an otherwise impassable object or trying to figure out if you need to command them to interact with their weapon to progress.

Low and Alone are also armed with a bow and arrow and a wrench, respectively, with which the heroes must navigate through the treacherous landscape of the Nowhere, avoiding and defeating enemies to find the mirror portal and escape the nightmare. The game doesn’t really utilize these tools particularly well; every now and then, Low will need to smash through a doorway or Alone will shoot down something suspended mid-air by a rope, or there’ll be a short combat sequence where the greatest challenge is working around the game’s depth of field to nail the enemy.

Alone in the world

While navigating levels often errs on tedium, there’s certainly plenty to look at. This goes a great length to increase the appeal of the game, but if you’re here for great scares, you might be disappointed. Again, that’s something that gets better as the game continues, with enemies becoming progressively more creatively creepy.

The bond between Low and Alone is another highlight, though it’s a fairly low bar. Their wordless, evolving companionship through the nether opens new avenues for gesture and emotion, and puts its individual stamp on the franchise. It takes a while to flourish, though – by which I mean there’s next to no story development or emotional tension between the two until the final chapter.

In a game this short that reduces the impact of the intended gut-punch ending, which fell quite flat for me when compared to Little Nightmares 2’s diabolical ending.

As far as world-building and narrative go, Little Nightmares 3 would have done well to lean more on its predecessors. It makes total sense for Supermassive to err on the side of caution when it comes to the established lore, but when there’s just so much great material to build on, and next to none of it connects with Low and Alone’s adventure, barring some Easter eggs here and there.

The biggest let-down for me, however, is certainly the enemies and bosses. Part of what made enemies in older games feel so haunting was that these surpassed childlike imagination; well-realized and challenging horrors we’d hope no child would ever dream of. In Little Nightmares 3, they feel much more derivative; a giant, decrepit baby doll, a miserly old hag with extra arms to grab you with, a ventriloquist, and a giant facility manager don’t exactly scream “otherworldly horror” to me.

Overall, there’s enough to like about Little Nightmares 3 to recommend it to the casual player, and if you missed the first two, it’s no bad way to be introduced to the core concepts underpinning the franchise. If, however, you’re a big fan like me and want something that evolves upon Tarsier’s hard work, you’ll find it difficult to settle in. It’s by no means a bad game; it’s just not a great one.

Should you play Little Nightmares 3?

Play it if...

Don’t play it if…

Accessibility features

There’s decent coverage for accessibility needs in Little Nightmares 3; from configurable controls to highlight toggles for characters and interactive elements.

There are also separate volume sliders for sound effects, music, playable characters and enemies, toggles for color-blind mode, axis inversion, camera shake and also indicators for when a character is off-screen.

How I reviewed Little Nightmares 3

I played the game to completion (circa. 8 hours) playing on my Xbox Series S with an Xbox Wireless Controller. I tested it using standard settings on my Sony KD-49XH8096 TV using Logitech Multimedia Z200 speakers.

When playing Little Nightmares 3, I compared my experience not only to the former two titles but also to other puzzle platform horror games like Limbo and Inside.

First reviewed November 2025

It's been a long time coming, but Football Manager 26 is finally here. With 2025 being the first year we haven't seen a new Football Manager game — or Championship Manager before it — since 1992, it was clear that when Sports Interactive decided to cancel last year's planned entry to the highly regarded football management simulation game, it must've been in a bad way.

It was always an ambitious sequel, with the developers being transparent about the switch to the Unity engine, with plans to use it for a huge graphical leap. For a modern-day football game, the matchday experience should be the flagship feature, but until now, it wouldn't have looked out of place on an original PlayStation. On Unity, it now looks at least like a PlayStation 2 game.

What's funny is that I'm not exaggerating in the slightest, but it isn't a criticism by any means. It isn't quite the dramatic jump forward we long-term virtual managers were hoping for, but it's still an improvement. Match intros have league-specific cutscenes, player animations are much more fluid, and the way the ball travels looks way more realistic. Football Manager is more than just the match engine, but this is hopefully a solid start to consistent graphical improvements over the course of the next few entries.

A couple of highlights

That will, unfortunately, be a running theme because Football Manager 26 is, for all intents and purposes, still very much a beta. There are improvements, and the important thing to keep in mind amongst all of the drawbacks is that this is still Football Manager at its core.

You're still going to be hooked, playing for hours on end, sacrificing sleep to try and take your beloved local club to glory… It's just that, despite all the hype and excitement around 26 being a full revamp for the series, it has significantly missed the mark.

Alongside the visually improved match engine, though, there is one other area where Football Manager 26 has genuinely improved on: tactics. For the first time in series history, you can now use two tactics simultaneously: one when you're in possession of the ball, and another when you're out of possession. The available player roles for any given position change, you can use an entirely different formation, the whole works. It adds an extra dynamic to tactics that we didn't have prior, and is one of the only genuine selling points for the new game.

I'd also be remiss not to mention the inclusion of women's football for the first time ever, and done to an impressive degree, too. There are 14 women's leagues across 11 countries, from the world-famous Women's Super League in England to the not-so-well-known Adran Premier next door in Wales.

Sports Interactive has 40 researchers dedicated to just the women's game, and even though there's no denying the mode won't be as popular as managing in the men's leagues, it's a great step for representation and is crucial in helping the sport become as recognised as it deserves to be.

Delivered a year late yet still undercooked

Unfortunately, even with the post-launch 26.0.4 update, Football Manager 26 is still a buggy, feature-barren, poor excuse for a full-priced video game launch, especially one that has 20+ years of history and consistency to fall back on.

There are so many missing features in this year's instalment that were available in previous iterations of the game, including but not limited to: International management, touchline shouts, squad depth tab, live cup draws, the data hub, create-a-club mode, versus mode, challenge mode, transfer deadline day, end of season summaries/fanfare, advanced match stats, the ability to save preset line-ups, and so many more slightly less significant removals that I could be here all day.

Not to mention the heaps upon heaps of not-quite game-breaking, but still infuriating bugs. Being able to select bench players to take penalties in a shootout, in-match text commentary that doesn't make sense, long text wrapping and obscuring other text… again, these are just a few examples of a considerably long list.

Even though Sports Interactive revealed touchline shouts were effectively useless, providing only the most minimal of morale boosts when performed correctly, I still find my muscle memory looking for them in almost every match.

That placebo effect was very real in Football Manager 2024, and while I understand the need to revamp them before bringing it back as a feature, it's perhaps the one I miss the most. That and transfer deadline day, specifically, thanks to missing out on a signing because the paperwork wasn't filed until 15 minutes after the deadline, which was something the dedicated deadline day mode in FM24 would've prevented. Damn fax machine.

Teaching an old dog new tricks

Finally, there are the many, many UI changes. As more and more players pick up Football Manager on console — despite for the longest time, it being a PC exclusive — development caters more towards them, leading to a complete UI overhaul.

As a diehard, decade-plus player, it was hard to get used to. Even though I know how the game works at its core, I had to learn where everything was again, and it was beyond frustrating when I'd go somewhere I expected something to be, and it inexplicably wasn't, so I had to resort to the search function.

I hesitate to call it bad UI design, though, because there's every chance I only dislike it because it's such a drastic change from what I'm familiar with. If you present a brand new player with both Football Manager 24 and 26 side by side, task them with learning each one, then ask which they prefer? I suspect their answer may be 26, even if we veterans are finding it tough.

As mentioned before, though, this is still Football Manager. It may be one of the worst launches the series has had, receptively from both critics and fans alike, but if you love the series despite all of its flaws, you're going to enjoy Football Manager 26.

Especially the improved tactics and match engine, because playing tiki taka with Manchester United, in a way I know for a fact we could never do in real life, is so worth it when compared to the match engine we put up with in the series prior to now. This game is essentially a beta for Football Manager 27, and it should be treated as such.

Should you play Football Manager 26?

Play it if...

Don't ply it if...

Accessibility features

As Football Manager has always been mostly spreadsheets, accessibility options come in the form of larger text, a color blind mode, the option to toggle flashing commentary when a goal is scored, and plain colours for commentary text to help distinguish them from a background.

The game also supports 19 different languages, has a number of camera settings when mid-match, but there are no difficulty modes or anything of that ilk, as they aren't required.

How I reviewed Football Manager 26

As with every Football Manager game, I began a one-season save with my beloved Manchester United, with an aim to place as high as possible in the league, but also not worry about long-term finances or transfers. At the time of writing, I have played around 17 hours of playtime according to Steam.

I've toyed around with the new tactics considerably, spent lots of time scouting and signing players that can make an immediate impact, and also sold a few (it really helps when Saudi Arabian clubs come in with ridiculous offers for your squad players).

I tested managing in the women's game for a short while, too, and experienced plenty of bugs. All of this was played on a Windows 11 PC via Steam. Football Manager 26 isn't particularly intensive, as the series has famously been able to run on basically any hardware, but my gaming PC sports an RTX 3080 and 32GB of memory.

First reviewed November 2025