A summing-up of the latest game from the brand behind Resident Evil sounds like the results of a focus group of seven-year-old boys to find out what they wanted in a video game.
A near-future Earth has been assailed by mysterious Space-time portals that pour out hordes of angry dinosaurs, all eager to gobble their new human friends. Earth’s only hope is its exosoldiers: battle-hardened troops wearing suits of powered armour and packing enough high-tech weaponry to remind a T-Rex what it means to be extinct. Basically, it’s Iron Man vs the Dinosaurs, played out as a team-based shooter.
Only there’s something even crazier going on, with an over-arching plot about a rogue AI pulling exosoldiers from different dimensions and pitting them against the displaced dinosaurs in order to test out the latest military tech. Told in bite-sized cinematics and anime-style scenes, it’s both bizarre and near-impossible to follow. Luckily, you don’t really need to.
Instead, focus on how Exoprimal plays. With each game, you join one of two teams of five players, jump into your robot exosuit, and head out to battle the homicidal dinos. You run through a series of mini-missions, blasting hordes of oversized reptiles, with the odd deviation where you battle larger boss dinosaurs or defend a control point against the cold-blooded hordes.
The only wrinkle is that you’re up against another team doing the same thing, with each game culminating in a fight, or a final sequence of missions where you win by finishing first. If you lose? Well, you’re dino-dinner, though you’ll soon be resurrected and ready for another run.
In a lot of ways, this is not much different from team-based modes we’ve seen before in Destiny 2, Halo, or even Call of Duty: just complete your objectives faster than the other team, and make the most of the occasional chance to stuff their efforts up.
In this case, that can mean heading off to attack them while they’re busy battling raptors and flying pteranodons, or it can mean getting a power-up that turns you into a hungry carnosaur, then speeding off to make the other team your lunch.
Going toe-to--toe with T-Rex and triceratops
However, Exoprimal does have some things going for it. Firstly, there’s more than one type of exosuit to play with, and each can be upgraded with new perks and gear that you’ll only unlock by playing — even losing a game can see you build up your experience points and bag new loot.
It all comes together in one daft but weirdly moreish action game
While the exosuits are sorted into types — Assault, Tank, and Support — each category hosts several different options, giving you the choice to head out with massive armour, and both physical and electronic force shields, or work as a healer, keeping your frontline Assault troops throwing firepower and explosives at the oncoming dinos.
This means you can play the game your way or flit between your favourite suits, upgrading them whenever possible to boost your damage or your chances of survival. For some of us, that’s going to be stomping into action in a Roadblock suit, using your shields to hold the scary, scaly monsters back, then sending them flying with a sudden jolt. For others, that’s going to be blasting away with a vast machine gun or chucking out grenades that blast the dinos skywards, preferably in flames. Find what works for you, then enjoy the fun.
It also means that you need to work as a team, with every player doing their best to fill their role in an efficient ensemble of dinosaur destruction. When you’ve got a furious triceratops thundering your way, you need your shielders and shooters working in tandem to halt them in their tracks. In the heat of battle, taking on dozens of dinos, it all comes together in one daft but weirdly moreish action game.
Sadly, Exoprimal has a problem — and one that goes beyond the spotty presentation, weird user interface, and poorly explained game mechanics. There’s not really enough to it, and what there is can be something of a grind. While there are sudden moments where the game goes unpredictably off-piste with a strange set-piece battle, for most of the time, you’re doing roughly the same stuff in roughly the same order across a handful of maps. You won’t have seen it all within the first few hours, but it doesn’t seem to evolve all that much.
This wouldn’t be a disaster if Exoprimal was a free-to-play title, and features like free loot crates and a premium battle pass indicate that this might have been the original idea. It also isn’t a huge problem if you’re playing on Xbox Games Pass, where this kind of snack-sized multiplayer game works well for a few hours a week until you move on. Yet it is a problem if you’re being asked to spend £40 to £50 on a game that feels like the add-on horde mode of something better.
Look, it’s robot battle suits vs dinosaurs. It’s the kind of game where you can hold back a wave of rampaging raptors, then scatter them across the streets with a single punch. Even at its worst, Exoprimal is silly, messy fun for your inner seven-year-old. It’s just not worth that kind of money, no matter how unhinged it is.
