Exoprimal‘s second beta test is over, but this time I actually got around to playing it. The first one coincided with one of Diablo IV‘s betas, which is a pretty ballsy move by Capcom considering how this is a new IP with a pretty unique premise.
The visual of dinosaurs pouring in like they are World War Z zombies is a bit goofy, but Exoprimal relishes in its insane premise, playing it straight for the most part but throwing in a few jokes here and there.
For those unfamiliar, Exoprimal is a cooperative third-person shooter set in the future, where giant space-time anomalies start spewing out dinosaurs all around the world.
People frequently joke about older media thinking the future was going to be way more advanced than it actually is, usually citing Back to the Future 2’s depiction of 2015 with its flying cars and hoverboards.
Exoprimal sets itself 20 years from now, in 2043, which makes me hope this game isn’t some sort of training software meant to prepare us for a cataclysmic event that only Capcom knows about, since I don’t think I have what it takes to fight a T-Rex, regardless of how cool the exosuits are.
We play as a new hire for Aibius, the corporation responsible for developing exosuits and training new pilots to deal with the dinosaur attacks. Our created character happens to be stationed around an island that hasn’t seen dinosaur activity for the last three years, but ends up getting stranded and then kidnapped by a rogue AI.
The Leviathan AI works for Aibius but runs tests using exosuit pilots in secret. It hosts a perpetual simulation of a dinosaur attack in which it pulls pilots into for research data, and this is the framework for our multiplayer matches, which Leviathan calls “wargames”.
Leviathan looks menacing, and his dialogue is pretty well written; it manages to sell the idea that he is a superior intellect who doesn’t care about humanity at all aside from the data he collects. The pilots who lose the wargames are left to be killed by packs of dinosaurs, while the winning teams simply get to fight again.
The winning exosuit pilots get taken back to their stranded ships after a wargame ends, and Leviathan only stocks the ships with a surviving exosuit pilot in them, meaning that with every wargame, five different crews are left to slowly starve.
Exoprimal‘s core gameplay is fun, the exosuits all have different kits and personalities, and their designs are fantastic. Matches happen in teams of 5, with the composition of tanks, supports and assaults, and anything involving the PvE aspect is easy to engage with.
The team composition aspect is done well, and nobody is stuck on a role they don’t want, any combination seems to be available for players to try out, and the exosuits all have a good amount of weight to them, while still feeling agile.
The mix between PvE and PvP at first seems interesting, but it doesn’t work. Both teams compete at finishing their PvE objectives as fast as possible, and then have to fight against each other at the end of the match. The PvE portion of the game ends up feeling largely unimportant because the last round is what decides the victor.
Clearing the PvE objectives faster barely gives your team any advantage, and the exosuits just weren’t made to fight each other. There’s barely any visual feedback for when the other suits get hurt, and there doesn’t seem to be any sort of balancing between them.
I tend not to enjoy team-based PvP games because it mostly feels like what I’m doing doesn’t matter. Every win feels like I got carried by someone better than me, and every loss feels like I got dragged down by someone worse than me.
I greatly enjoyed Exoprimal‘s PvE content since it’s a genuinely fun horde shooter, but I’m still iffy on the PvP aspect. Thankfully, my complaints have been echoed by the community, and Capcom has seemingly listened, stating they will make the PvP content optional, which is probably the way to go in this game.
Exoprimal is set to release on July 13th, 2023, for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam)
