Arc Raiders was an incredible game when it launched almost exactly one year ago. It joined Sea of Thieves and Left 4 Dead as one of my favorite co-op games ever. Many others loved it too, and it quickly surged to become one of 2025’s best sellers and biggest stories. But in the months that followed, a large portion of players fell off the game’s live-service carousel–or maybe “jumped off” is a better way to put it.
Embark Studios announced in May that it was moving to semi-annual major updates to create a healthier environment for developers and players alike, as the monthly cadence began to feel like building a plane while it was already in the air. The team needed more time to deliver updates that felt as meaningful as it intended, and as engaging as players expected.
Fast forward to this week, and we finally have the first major update since the team announced those changes. Having played it for a few hours, I find the Frozen Trail update to be a hefty, thrilling, inventive makeover that reaffirms why I love Arc Raiders so much, though it does feel like it’s for players like me: players who never left or want a good excuse to come back. Like what Bungie is realizing with Marathon, I expect Arc Raiders’ Frozen Trail update will also serve as a reminder that this genre’s appeal simply has a lower ceiling than something like Fortnite, but isn’t that fine?
Frozen Trail adds a frosty new map, a major map event that acts as a puzzle- and combat-filled raid, new weapons, enemies, an overhaul to the skill tree, customization spaces called Outposts, a new in-game system for buffing your guns, weapon cosmetics, and a multi-tiered battle pass. It’s a huge update, and arranged in sequence like this, it already suggests a proof of concept for the team’s decision to spend the extra time. No update of this scale ever came to Arc Raiders before now.
In fact, that’s not even the comprehensive list. Alongside bug fixes and other quality-of-life changes also baked into the October 8 patch, my favorite part of Frozen Trail is its new gadgets. Two different in-game cameras debut with the update, giving players an official (and diegetic) photo mode, including the ability to turn the camera around for a selfie. More musical instruments are on the way too: harmonicas and banjos, allowing for more diverse sounds and grander performances when you come across others willing to jam with you while topside.
The Tether Launcher is a handheld gun that shoots a wire between two points of your choosing. They have to be relatively near one another, extending for several feet but not something like from one corner of the map to another; otherwise, it’s up to you how to use it. It can mean tying two flying Arc machines together so they collide mid-air, or connecting another raider to the Leaper patrolling outside your door, or whatever else you come up with.
I often liken Arc Raiders to Sea of Thieves for how it expresses the same credo that gives Rare’s pirate game so much of its appeal: “tools, not rules.” The Tether Launcher is a great example of that approach. Give the community a cool toy and see what they come up with. Even when Arc Raiders’ hype and updates slowed, this remained an intrinsic part of its magic.
The Yank Grenade works similarly, though more automatically. Throw one, and it’ll quickly explode and deploy a tether, tying whatever is nearest to a sturdy base like the ground or a rooftop. It’s best used in more desperate times when you can’t take the time to manually aim the Tether Launcher.
But my favorite of them all is the grappling hook. You might think the Snaphook that has been in the game since launch was a grappling hook, and sure, it was a type of grappling hook, but the new one in Frozen Trail does not replace it; it lives alongside it, with some key differences.
For one, the Snaphook behaves like Batman’s grapnel gun, quickly pulling you toward your target in a straight line. The grappling hook is more like–well, okay, Batman has one of these too, but I’ll liken it instead to Nathan Drake’s hook in Uncharted 4. You can swing across gaps, throw it over a roof and then walk up or shimmy across walls, or even use it to climb down more safely from a high point. If you use it wisely, it can erase the threat of fall damage in lots of situations where it would’ve been your doom. It’s slower than a Snaphook–in testing it, PC Gamer’s Morgan Park and I found it’s roughly as fast as scaling a ladder–but it’s more versatile, too, and solves problems the Snaphook can’t.
In my early play sessions with Frozen Trail’s toybox, nothing was more exciting. I spent a whole 30-minute round experimenting with it, but it also helped me get out of a jam when I was chased by several flying machines. Badly wounded, I found myself seeking refuge in a warehouse with only one apparent exit–the one the machines waited at–until I realized I could use the grappling hook to climb some shelves and jump out of a back window I couldn’t have reached without the hook.
It’s especially cool that it has no cooldown and no durability. Unless you lose one to being knocked out by a raider or machine (or maybe a botched swing, in this case), it seems it’ll be yours to keep, no repairs required. Like defibrillators and my Photoelectric Cloak that hides me from the machines with the power of America Online noises, I’ll never leave Speranza without one.
Arc Raiders was a brilliant game when it arrived on the scene last October, and it’s remained that way for me every day since. Yes, I hated the generative AI elements, too, but the core elements of the Arc Raiders experience mean I’d have been happy to play it forever, even if it never got another update. Still, I understand many other players wished for more. Frozen Trail definitely feels like all that “more” that Embark promised back in the spring.
It won’t make you a fan of the game–or the polarizing genre–if you’ve already tried it and found it ill-suited to your taste in games. But for players who never left, wanted a reason to return, or have been on the outside wondering if it’s for them, tomorrow’s Frozen Trail update certainly makes Arc Raiders a better, more experimental game than it was yesterday.
