Exoprimal

What if I told you that Exoprimal took multiple hours and matches before growing into a more diverse game? Would you be less prone to play it?

What if I told you that Exoprimal cost $60 dollars–unless you download it on Games Pass–and is a multiplayer only game currently featuring one mode? Would you not want to spend the money or hard drive space on it?

What if I told you that I have questions about Exoprimal‘s long-term viability in a year of excellent games and multiple other titles vying for your investment? Would you lose faith in its ability to have a healthy, sustainable community?

But what if I told you that Exoprimal is pretty damn fun?

Exoprimal adds itself to that murky soup of nebulous “what ifs” that plague a lot of games. What constitutes a full-price game? Should any multiplayer game not featuring a single-player experience be shoved into the free-to-play bin? Is it fair to judge what a game can and will offer in the future outside of its initial package?

Regardless of Capcom’s recent stellar output, Exoprimal is an odd duck. The game borrows heavily from Overwatch. And Lost Planet. And Earth Defense Force. And Monster Hunter. And several other things.

Bundled in this package is a PvEvP game built on the back of one current mode that is actually a mixture of traditional multiplayer modes featuring a story that progresses in-between and during matches. And the crazy part is that Exoprimal does very little to communicate any of this to the player.

Instead, Exoprimal has embraced the absurdity of it being a game about players shooting down dinosaurs that spew out of vortexes in the sky. And yes, that is certainly a large portion of the game. But that’s only a small dose of what’s truly going on beneath the scaly surface of Capcom’s weirdest experiment in years.

Exoprimal is a game where players choose one of ten exofighters to defeat hordes of dinosaurs. At launch the only mode available to players is called “Dino Survival.” While there is a narrative component to the game, players will have to complete over 50 individual rounds of Dino Survival before they roll the credits on the story. During those 50-ish matches, players slowly encounter new types of dinosaurs and mission types that inject variety into the game. What is truly going to stand in the way of Exoprimal is that Capcom does not do a good job at communicating progression to players.

Shortly after wrapping up the tutorial, players are informed that playing rounds of Dino Survival will unlock spokes and nodes on a large informational wheel meant to convey story details. Little blue squares comprising a full circle indicate documents, short videos, audio logs, and other bits that expand the world of Exoprimal. In the game, the player character and their crew have crash landed on Bikitoa Island, which was destroyed years ago after a cataclysmic event caused dinosaurs to come out of vortexes and a tsunami killed almost everyone there. Somehow, a rogue AI named Leviathan repeatedly takes our character hostage and transports them back in time from 2043 to 2040 on the day of Bikitoa’s destruction to fight in wargames against the flood of dinosaurs.

Okay, it doesn’t make much sense and is weird as hell but that’s okay! Exoprimal has a ridiculous premise and a surprising main cast of charming characters that are well voiced and full of personality. Sure most of the narrative chunks of the game and world building are delivered through static image presentations with voice narration but that’s okay too! After all, this is primarily a multiplayer game where everything kind of swirls together, right?

Initially, I played several rounds of Dino Survival without engaging much in the “Analysis” tab of the menu where players could interact with these story bits in hopes of figuring out how to escape Bikitoa. After two or three rounds that can last about 15 minutes each, I would look at any new information and move on. Periodically, the game plays a cutscene that acts as a bookend which progresses the story further, with an indicator showing informing players how many more matches of Dino Survival are required to unlock the next bit.

To create a synergy between the narrative and gameplay, Capcom made the choice to tie the mission variety and structure to how much the player is learning about the world of Exoprimal. I can’t say I hate the idea of the decision but I imagine there will be players who boot up the game, see one mode available, play that mode four or five times with no variation and just bail because there’s no sign anything will change.

Frustratingly, I feel like my first 5 to 10 rounds of Dino Survival were conducted on the same map. In each round I had to kill waves of raptors, flying pteranodons, and a large carnotaurus. That culminated in a final segment where my team of 5 escorted a data point/payload while another team of 5 was doing the same thing, only this time we could fight the opposite team.

At some point–which felt like after I had investigated enough new information but probably just after I played enough and watched the new cutscene–I did something different in Exoprimal. I had already experimented with different exosuits and got comfortable with what felt like the only thing the game was doing. But suddenly, I had a new mission type! I think I had to hold down a control point and defend it from dinosaurs. Or maybe it was the game type where both teams had to fight over three individual control points… it kind of blurs together. The dinosaurs I fought were the same but at least the objective was new, right?! But then the next round I fought a triceratops instead of a carnosaur as the big bad dinosaur and maybe there were those hard-headed pachycephalosaurus that could toss me around.

Exoprimal typically starts players with multiple rounds of killing a specific number of certain dinosaurs with your team of five, culminating in some other objective-based section against an enemy team. The whole time, the rogue AI Leviathan is indicating whether your team is completing objectives faster or slower than the other team, instilling panic, hope, or adrenaline.

The fact that this formula doesn’t really change for what could be argued as a fifth of the game–logic being 10 matches out of 50–can feel alarming. But thankfully, it gets better.

Capcom did an excellent job at designing the 10 exosuits players can use. There are three support roles focused on healing, three tank roles meant to mitigate damage from dinosaurs and other players, and four assault roles that deal significant damage. Typically, I find assault characters to be my least favorite in games like this, despite being the most efficient.

The four assault classes in Exoprimal do stand out from each other. Deadeye uses a rapid-fire assault rifle and a frag grenade to do big numbers. Zephyr is fast and melee-focused to get in the thick of swarms. Barrage uses a grenade launcher to do high amounts of splash damage which is great for those large packs of raptors. And Vigilant uses a sniper rifle that can be charged to do incredible critical damage.

Roadblock is the most cookie-cutter tank, using its fist to bash dinosaurs while deploying a shield that can hold off nearly any attack. Krieger uses a machine gun that can infinitely fire as long as it doesn’t overheat while dropping a dome shield that isn’t as potent as Roadblock’s. Murasame slashes dinosaurs with his sword and can absorb damage with a block before delivering a counterattack.

Witchdoctor can drop an area heal while zapping dinos with a staff. Skywave can fly around and launch small pools that heal allies and harm dinos. Nimbus skates around using dual pistols that can shoot allies with healing bullets or change modes to hurt enemies.

Anyone who has spent a couple hours with Overwatch should recognize the counterparts in Exoprimal. However, each exosuit gains its own personality the longer players use it. Each suit has the utility to do damage but a team without a healer will eventually crumble under the constant damage dinosaur bites inflict. Usually the best team compositions had at least an even split between tanks and assault classes with one healer. However, depending on the skill and the combinations, I can see multiple support classes flooding three assaults with enough health to stay alive.

Each exosuit has a handful of abilities that have varying degrees of use depending on the scenario and one ultimate ability that charges up over the course of the round. Players can supplement each suit with three mod slots that can be equipped with a universal pool of bonuses or suit-specific mods that are unlocked as the individual suit levels up. Over the course of playing Exoprimal, I found the universal mods to be okay to help get exosuits to a level where unique mods were unlocked. Still, I don’t a player with fully-leveled mods will have an extreme advantage over a player with weaker mods.

Exoprimal‘s power and experience climb, alongside its strange progression, begin to make a bit more sense as the game continues. Players have to deal with several rounds of similar content, learning the ropes of team composition and getting a feel for what exosuits work best. Because suits can be changed mid-match, there’s more knowledge on when your team might need a change. Soon enough, the game begins to throw increasingly difficult dinosaurs at teams, eventually culminating in ones that have elemental effects, go invisible, or can snipe players from a distance. Just when you begin to feel too comfortable, the game throws a wrench in the formula.

Strangely, the escalating difficulty coincides with the villainous Leviathan AI constantly testing the player character for combat data. Mechanically it may feel frustrating but narratively, Capcom seems to have thought deeply about this. Initially, I was confused why the game wouldn’t announce the arrival of a new dinosaur and instead just ask teams to brute force through it. I remember wondering why the hell all my powers were suddenly disabled only to realize that for the first time in maybe 20 rounds a stegosaurus had been summoned which has the ability to suppress anything that wasn’t a primary weapon. Sure, Exoprimal, whatever you say. But honestly I loved making those discoveries for myself because I had become acclimated to the game’s strange pace.

Then Exoprimal does something insane like start a match like normal only to summon all 10 players into a virtual arena and force them to fight a few thousand raptors before calling in a “Neo T-rex” through a portal. With a limited pool of lives, the group of 10 must take down this massive beast that shoots lasers, vomits poison, and can suck in exosuits through a vortex in its mouth. Moments like this turn Exoprimal from a fun, wacky shooter into a brilliant, wacky shooter that you don’t want to put down just to see what’s next.

And then you go back into the same mission type as before… ugh.

These choices cut Exoprimal off at the knees, gatekeeping some of the best content for both story progression and potential matchmaking parity. There were times I wondered if I was being put into an escort mission with a story NPC multiple times just because I was being matchmade with other players or if it was just another weird story quirk the game was throwing at me. Another frustration is due to the actual matchmaking. There were instances I was stuck loading into the pre-lobby area for up to a minute or longer, only to have most people disconnect from the long queue times. A few times I would be on a team with multiple bots while the other team had a full stack of human players.

Considering the game rewards players with bonus experience for winning, it was frustrating knowing a match was doomed before it even started. I will give credit to Exoprimal for inventing ways to keep the stakes interesting and very close. In the final round, both teams can summon a larger dinosaur to attack the opposition, usually creating a head-game on when it would be best to attack and do the most chaos. Other times, a team may get a bonus dinosaur to kill and then wrack up points to inflict the other team with harder mobs. Several times when playing my team would come back from the brink and win. Other times the opposite would happen and crush my spirits.

But I still couldn’t help but wonder if there is a solution to these issues. Could you load more bots in with newer players and let more experienced ones play against humans? Most would say the best solution would be to have more than one mode available to play, especially one that queued players into the most unique content. But what happens when no one wants to play the same rounds of Dino Survival time and time again?

Honestly, that’s the biggest “what if” with Exoprimal and one I can’t help but think about when reviewing this game. Look, Exoprimal is an insane blast to play. Capcom has nailed the shooting mechanics and even made rote multiplayer modes incredibly fun. But right now there is one mode in the game that encapsulates all the content the game has to offer. All the cinematic in-mission events happen in Dino Survival. All the bizarre combinations of fights happen in Dino Survival. All the learning the ropes happen in Dino Survival. Where are the endless wave modes? The ability to play just big boss battles? It’s all in the one mode. I’ve gone online and looked at forums for the game and have seen the warm reception by players with similar sentiments attached. Some have rolled credits and not even encountered specific maps. Other players have their account leveled up into triple digits. So many things are clicking while others just don’t make sense.

Understandably in these launch weeks Capcom doesn’t want to divide the community up, especially when it comes to learning the ropes. But I can’t imagine what Call of Duty would be like if everyone could only play what the matchmaking assigned them. In the weeks to come, Exoprimal will get an intense mode that includes leaderboards and harder waves of dinos with modifiers called the Savage Gauntlet, meant to test higher-level exosuits. Later on, “alpha” variations of all ten exosuits arrive that change the core weapon of a suit, creating more variety. All these pieces of content sound awesome and present viable engagement for a game that is doing so much right. The scary thing is whether or not there will be a dedicated community to support it in the months to come.

Exoprimal is such an incredibly unique game that mixes traditional multiplayer competition with a bizarre premise. Want to mow down thousands of dinosaurs with a team and crush your enemies before they can do the same? The tragedy is that players need to power through a lot of repetition before they get to the strongest and best parts of the game. Underneath a strange progression package are 10-player raid-like boss fights and thrilling combat encounters that feel at home in bigger budget single-player titles. Capcom has given players a lot to look forward to with Exoprimal. My only question is if the masses will seek out this adventurous game and give it the love it deserves.