Exoprimal is the silliest game you’re going to play this year. That was my feeling last time we went hands on with Capcom’s latest multiplayer shooter, and little has changed since then. Capcom haven’t suddenly decided that they’re going to turn it into a puzzle game or a Richard Attenborough documentary, and to be honest, as much as the man and his dulcet tones are a national treasure, I’d rather play another round of Exoprimal’s ridiculous carnivorous chaos.
Exoprimal is Capcom’s new take on a Left 4 Dead’s horde mode, by way of a multiplayer hero shooter and EA’s Anthem, with the crispy offcuts of Jurassic World Evolution liberally sprinkled on top. You are an operative, clad in a hugely powerful mechanised Exosuit, and you find yourself at the behest of the Leviathan AI. It’s still not entirely clear why this AI tasks you with fighting a steady stream of Velociraptors, T-Rex and Triceratops – the story promises something about dimensions and alternate timelines – but Exoprimal is not a game to ask too many questions of.
We had an early look at the open beta – you can hop in from midnight tonight (12AM UTC 17th March) to try it for yourself – and while there are going to be other modes to play at the game’s full launch, you’re only getting a taste of the main Dino Survival. This is a 5v5 team mode, which is part-asymmetrical and part head-to-head, with two teams racing through randomised objectives towards a final showdown. The first team to complete all the missions and then that final goal wins!
There’s an enjoyable variety to Dino Survival, from simple area clearing, to objective defence, and more inventive final objectives, though its fundamental core is that your team run to an area on the map and then have to despatch, maim and otherwise euthanise the prehistoric creatures that pour out of the purple portals in the sky. They really do pour out as well, with huge numbers of clawed things all set to be mown down by the hail of explosive rounds your Exosuit spits back at them. While you’re moving from area to area, you might have to collect battery packs to charge up, guide a data cube along a track or protect a shuttle from being smashed up. Whatever your task, you need to work together as a team – there’s little room for lone wolfing here, especially when tougher special dinos appear, whether they’re snipers, explosive or toughened up icons of dino movies.
Each of the exosuits has its own unique weaponry and abilities, and you can swap in and out of them at any point during a mission, allowing you to find the best setup for the creature in front of you. They largely fall into three broad categories, with Attack, Tank and Support classes each playing host to a minimum of three suit types. Your basic every-mech is the Deadeye suit, with its reassuring third-person shooter rifle and the special ability to launch grenades and missiles at the Jurassic mass. This thing makes removing thousands of enemy dinosaurs a breeze, but it’s going to need to work alongside a balanced team to have success.
The new exosuits you can try out in this beta proved to be similarly destructive, but unique and varied enough to warrant hopping into at specific moments. I had a lot of fun with Krieger, a tank suit that carries a huge minigun and can mow down hordes of enemies with alacrity. The other new tank suit, Murasame, is fashioned on a samurai, with a blade that will make short work of both enemy teams and dinosaurs. Nimbus, the skating support suit, is very mobile and very reminiscent of Overwatch’s Lucio mixed with Transformer’s Arcee, and there’s a grenade launching suit that will feel reminiscent of Junkrat, but I suppose we’re at a stage where making truly unique characters in the shooter space is nigh-on impossible.
There are plenty of other things that make Exoprimal interesting, and key amongst them is when the two teams come together at points to fight or disrupt one another, often while still trying to get rid of the dinosaurs. The tone and action take a considerable shift, and you have to really readjust your brain to deal with a live player after the waves of relatively dumb therapods. There’s a decent push and pull throughout the sections where you’re operating independently too, with the AI intoning that ‘the other team is clearing objectives faster than you’ and their spectral representations appearing further along the map, allguaranteed to spur you on. Well, that or annoy the hell out of you, it’s a close-run thing.
The game clearly wants to keep you in a close fight, so if one team gets too far ahead, then the other will be handed a way to toughen up the dinosaurs the leaders are facing for a while, or they might get a pickup that lets them transform into a T-Rex or Triceratops to go on a rampage and smash through the other team for a while. We were on the wrong end of one of these comebacks in the final stages, adding to that deep-seated annoyance at Leviathan’s progress messages.
Joking aside, I’m really looking forward to finding out more about the story in Exoprimal. It feels like it’s doubtless going to sit at the schlockier end of Capcom’s output, but if it has a touch of the early Resident Evils and the modern Monster Hunters about it I expect it to be a lot of fun. There’s time travel, mech suits, multiplayer, rogue AIs and dinosaurs – what’s not to like?
Exoprimal has the makings of a cult classic shooter, but in a world where there’s a new multiplayer game making a bid for our attention every week, it’ll be interesting to see if it’s a hit with players. Intrigued? You can check out the open beta now, available on nearly PlayStation, Xbox and PC with full cross-platform play so you can hook up with your friends no matter where they play.
