Extinction

I really, really wanted to like Extinction and for the first hour or so I genuinely did. However, the longer I played the more frustrated I got. Frustrated with the gameplay itself (which I’ll get to) but also frustrated with a game that has so much potential but fails to deliver. In Extinction you play as Avil, the world’s last Sentinel who are essentially very specialised soldiers. Their specialisation? Killing a species of giants called the Ravenii. In the beginning you have no idea why the Ravenii are attacking or, exactly, who the Sentinels are.

These details are revealed to you eventually as part of the seven chapter, thirty plus mission campaign. Most of the exposition takes places via pop up chats at the start and conclusion of each mission. The dialog is okay and some of the humour tries hard to lighten the sombre events taking place in-front of you. If you do fail a mission you can skip the dialog, thankfully, but in-between each chapter are gloriously animated shorts that fill in the backstory to the events taking place in the now. The story’s rather formulaic and, not wanting to spoil anything, I wasn’t surprised or shocked by some of the events that unfolded. Still, it wasn’t too hokey and thanks to the animated shorts it was a pretty decent experience.

It’s a shame, then, that pretty much everything else about Extinction is such a letdown and I don’t make that statement lightly. When you first load up the campaign the first few missions are used as a tutorial of sorts and whizz by in a haze of bladed fury. However, as you progress you start to realise that the ideas and variation are thin on the ground both in missions and enemies so much so that later levels rely on a wheel of misfortune to determine the variables for a level. Conceptually it sounds fun as no two run throughs of the level are the same but what it hides is the fact that they barely differ in their core challenge. You either have to save a certain number of civilians, kill so many Jackals, defend Watchtowers for a set time or kill a number of Ravenii. The only thing that actually changes is the challenges for each level and the terrain and that’s it.

So if there’s not much variation in missions surely there should be lots of things to kill with your super awesome Sentinel skills? Well, not exactly. Sure, as you progress you come across stronger Ravenii as well as more capable grunts that follow them. In the beginning you just have to deal with Wooden armour, easily broken by Avil’s special Rune Strike. Later armour requires you to break locks, hit specific points or, in the case of the spiked armour, force the Ravenii to try and hit you to weaken the armour. There are also stronger grunts, or Jackals as they’re called. There are two basic types, the winged Vultr and then the red Elite Jackals, the latter posing a threat in missions that require you to save civilians. However, unless your missions specifically requires you to kill them as the main objective or on certain civilian missions you can safely ignore them. Whilst they do give Avil energy to fill his Rune Strike bar to the point where his Kill Strike is active, which you need to kill the Ravenii for good, you get more bang for your buck by destroying armour and rescuing civilians.

In fact, by centring each mission around one specific goal you can steam through levels relatively easily by ignoring everything else. Does the mission require you to defend Watchtowers? Initially I found these difficult until I realised the game only spawns two Ravenii at a time for these levels. Therefore by getting both to the point where I could lop off their legs I could keep them both in the level and let the timer run down. Similarly, levels which required me to save civilians I just ran around to each portal and hit Y. Sure, I’d be hit by the occasional Jackal thereby interrupting my casting but you can level up Avil and make this process much quicker. I didn’t care that the Ravenii were laying waste to the city, as long as I did this before the extinction meter in the top right hit 0% I was golden. By making the levels so mind-numbingly repetitive Extinction seems to want you to beeline each level and to hell with any of the challenges. Whilst this won’t get you all the achievements it will get you to the end and quickly too.

Perhaps, then, since this is made by Iron Galaxy who know a thing or two about fighting games, taking on your enemies in armed combat is fun? Much like the game itself, to begin with it seems rather fluid as you despatch your first few Jackals. Unfortunately, once a Ravenii shows up it descends into a mess of awful camera angles, unresponsive controls and, here’s that word again, repetitive button mashing. As mentioned you need to take out the armour of the Ravenii first before you can lop off limbs to disable the Ravenii so you can increase your Rune Strike meter. To do so you hold down left trigger to aim at weak spots which show up as red. Unfortunately, swinging the camera round seems to take an age and aiming your strike is sometimes pot luck, I’ve lost count of the times where I had my aim lined up for it to apparently miss its mark.

Once you’ve finally filled your Rune Strike enough to enable your Kill Strike you will need to scale the Ravenii to relieve them of their heads. You can either do this with the grappling hook or, if you take out a leg, you can scale them from their back up. The former is pretty much pointless as the auto-aim seems haphazard and often, at least in my experience, sees you catapulted in the opposite direction to which you really wanted. So for the most part I would take out a leg and climb up. This seemed to be done by mashing the jump button until, if I was lucky, I’d end up on the Ravenii’s shoulders. If I wasn’t lucky I’d end up in his armpit or falling off completely. Annoyingly, some Ravenii would have a helmet on so even more Rune Strike aiming was needed and when I could eventually use my Kill Strike I’d often take two or three goes because, for whatever reason, my aim wasn’t good enough. This was despite having the red circle appearing advising you were good to go with relieving a Ravenii of a limb.

I could go on and on about things that annoy me about Extinction. From the repeated quips made by support characters every time you die, usually by a Ravenii one-hit kill to the same support characters frequently reminding you that you’re not doing whatever you were supposed to be doing. Then there’s the flip-flopping of difficulty as one moment a level is hard, almost obtusely so, and then the next is so easy it’s done in next to no time. Then there’s the respawn points in levels which, in many cases see you reappear miles from your death meaning, if you die a lot, you’re often behind the eight ball trying to recover the distance before anything bad happens.

There are other modes in Extinction other than the campaign. There’s a daily challenge which sees you taking on a set level and compare your score against fellow Extinction players. There’s also offline Challenges which task you with saving a set amount of civilians with medals for completing them in a set time. Skirmish also sees you tasked with saving civilians but there’s no time limit and you can fight Ravenii to get more points. Finally there’s Extinction which pits you against an unlimited number of enemies and only ends once you die or the city is destroyed. Again though this is all just a re-hash of the same core tasks and suffers from the repetitive nature of its Campaign. What’s even more disappointing is that modes like Skirmish or Extinction have no option for Co-Op. This seems like a huge missed opportunity as what could be more fun than lopping of the legs of Ravenii than doing it with a friend?!

There are very few games that I’ve played where doing so became a chore and no matter how many times I tried to look for the fun I came up empty. Every time I took on a level I was looking for the fastest way to complete it rather than how best to achieve the goal plus accompanying challenges. The core idea sounds fun and with a bit more polish and deepening of the Campaign Extinction could’ve been a pretty decent action-adventure hack-and-slash. As it is, it’s a poorly executed homage of far better games which, in all honesty, are far more worthy of your time.