admin I’m a humble man with simple needs. It turns out what I really look for in games is a really good bumpity-bumpity-bumpity noise while sliding down a flight of stairs. If it weren’t already packed with a squillion other good reasons, this would still be enough on its own to have me booting up Arc Raiders.
Let’s not mince words: sliding down a flight of stairs is great. From bumping down the carpeted steps on my bottom as a child, to launching myself down headfirst on a sleeping bag as a teenager, it’s an ideal way to spend a wet afternoon before a trip to the ER. As an adult, however, my significantly less resilient frame tends to object to such antics, and falling down the stairs has become the stuff of nightmares, likely to bruise a bone such that I’ll complain for a month. So thank goodness for Arc Raiders and its simulation of the joyful action.
In Arc, like so many first- and third-person shooters, when you hit the crouch/crawl button while sprinting, it plunges your character into a sliding skid that is primarily programmed into most games to look cool. However, in Embark Studio’s extraction shooter, the action has multiple benefits. First and foremost, there’s the looking cool, but beyond this, skidding is a fast way to descend hills without draining your stamina. In fact, you can actually regain stamina during a skid, and when well-timed, it’s the perfect means of escape from a feisty gang of angry drones. Run, crouch, and slide down the dusty slopes, then regain enough energy to sprint off into a nearby doorway at the bottom.
But it’s not until you attempt this move at the top of a flight of steps, whether they’re in a concrete bunker or from a metal walkway, that you discover the utter life-affirming joy that’s on offer here. Sliding down steps is the smoothest, most satisfying movement in a video game since Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning‘s forward roll. Its perfection is a combination of factors that I shall lay out for you, scientifically:
- It’s not just a gimmick, but a very effective means of movement, especially when trying to escape danger
- It’s an uninterrupted and effortless slide with no tiresome movement penalty at the end
- You go “ba-dada, ba-dada, ba-dada” as you bump down the stairs at such speed in the most rewarding aural element in all of gaming history
Sometimes when I’m playing, I’ll see other players just running down stairs and not sliding, and I worry. I worry that either they don’t know, and thus the vital necessity of this article. Or far, far worse, they do know and yet choose not to. These are broken people, and we need to have a way to report them not for bad play, but for the emotional support they so desperately deserve.
Arc Raiders‘ stair slides are a deep pleasure in difficult times, a sublime all-rewarding action that delivers both function and form, and it would be a sin against all that is positive not to celebrate them.
