For a game with a “dinosaur forecast” that warns of thousands of dinosaurs raining down from portals in the sky, what’s surprising about Exoprimal is that it’s somehow even stranger than its premise suggests. It’s a competitive hero shooter and sometimes cooperative. In a dinosaur hunting war game he consists of 5 players. He has two teams pitted against each other, competing indirectly and sometimes directly in separate parallel worlds, who can complete the grab bag. Compete for You can reach your goals faster. It takes many familiar elements from team-based multiplayer games like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2, and combines them with wave-based survival elements to create and discover a completely unique experience. It’s a lot of fun if you can. balanced team.
After about 10 hours, my first impressions of Exoprimal were mostly positive. Competing for efficiency in defeating literally thousands of dinosaurs with a twist is a fresh and fun take on the competitive hero shooter genre. All 10 exosuits fulfill satisfying roles and have fun abilities with great synergy. There were also some nice surprises. In that the campaign story blends into the multiplayer space.
It may not be clear enough yet, but Exoprimal is a multiplayer-only game. There’s no single-player campaign, despite a somewhat complex but interestingly woven plot that contextualizes each multiplayer match. Essentially, you and your crew are trapped on the mysterious island of Viquitoa, shrouded in mystery since dinosaurs first rained down from the heavens three years ago, and are forced to participate in a data-gathering war game. be forced. of a malicious AI named Leviathan.
Every match is a series of rounds with objectives ranging from simply killing an X-headed dino, to capturing a control point, to killing an extra-burly dino that tries to flee from you. Configured. Two teams compete in separate instances, trying to reach their goals faster than the other team does. The first team to reach their goal will have a head start in the final round. I really like this twist. Instead of focusing on super-precise accuracy, jerky reflexes, and map knowledge, focus primarily on efficiency. These include making sure you keep cooldowns, using special techniques to deal maximum damage to the most enemies, and helping your teammates do their job. It takes the same skills you use in other hero shooters, but applies them in new and interesting ways.
In the final round, if you’re opting for PVP, two parallel worlds merge, allowing you to interact directly with the opposing team as you push your payload into the goal. At certain points during the match, Leviathan assigns one of his on the team a “Dominator”, giving him the ability to transform into a giant Carnotaurus or Triceratops for a period of time and wreak havoc on the opposing team.
Each time you complete a match, you unlock more nodes on the Analysis Map, the giant chart that chronicles the story of Exoprimal. The idea is that the more matches you play, the more data your team receives, and the more you learn about the various mysteries at the heart of the story. These mysteries include what happened on the island of Biquitoa three years ago, why the Leviathan is running a war game, why dinosaurs are falling from the sky in the first place, and how the story is centered on the island. includes an escape method. At the moment, Exoprimal doesn’t really interest me in any of these mysteries, characters, or worlds, so it feels more like a reviewer’s duty than anything else to head to the analysis map after every match. can be
What’s interesting is that the occasional story event happens during a normal multiplayer match. In one match, an uninvited exosuit crashed the game, causing Leviathan to introduce newer, more dangerous dinosaurs to eliminate the invasion. My only wish is for these events to occur more frequently. One of the biggest issues with his Exoprimal at the moment is that it’s starting to become taxing on him fighting the same dino in the same mode on the same map for 5 hours on repeat.
Tyrannosaurus Rexo Suit
Exoprimal’s 10 exosuits currently available are divided into three categories: Assault, Support, and Tank. Assault suits tend to focus more on maximum damage per second, while supports naturally focus more on healing and crowd control. Tanks are at the forefront with damage-absorbing and aggro-friendly abilities. Even within those classes, there is a great variety of playstyles. My favorite assault exoskeleton suit is the Zephyr. It can only attack in melee range, but it makes up for it with lightning-fast speed and maneuverability options that make other exosuits seem quite slow by comparison. Compare that to barrage, which utilizes all sorts of ranged attacks, from stun grenades to projectile grenades, to remote mines, and even transforming them into the ultimate human missile.
If you think the last one looks a lot like Overwatch’s Junkrat, you’re right.there is many There are similarities to characters from Overwatch, and some are a little more brazen than others. I wish there was a little more originality to some of Exoprimal’s exosuit designs, but they’re generally different enough that they don’t feel like sheer carbon copies.
Exoprimal’s multiplayer matches are designed with a strong focus on teamwork, making it a very fun experience when you have a well-communicated and balanced team, and a very frustrating experience when you don’t. It also leads to common problems. This is a problem compounded by a progression system that encourages sticking with a single exosuit by assigning each one its own level of progression. The more you play with an exosuit, the faster you can unlock advanced modules that dramatically affect its power, although this seems to contradict the hot-swappable nature of the actual mode. I can feel it. If you want to focus on unlocking Zephyr’s modules, but your team already has three other Assault his characters, have someone else change them, or change yourself to make his Zephyr You will be put in the uncomfortable position of having to slow down the progress of Or they may play a game with a poor team composition, stubbornly not trying to move. This is not an ideal situation at all. I wish there was a system that allowed me to continue progressing through exosuit levels without being forced to play as an exosuit.
We’re still a long way from a final verdict on Exoprimal, but we’re at about 51% analytic map completion and 27 games played. How Dino Survival Mode continues to evolve as the story progresses, and what other surprises await, like the one that happened to me earlier when the regular game suddenly crashed due to an uninvited exoskeleton suit. I am very interested in seeing what Exoprimal has a lot of interesting ideas, but the real question is whether you’re interested in continuing to use it after all the cards have been revealed.
Mitchell Saltzman is IGN’s Editorial Producer.you can find him on twitter @JurassicRabbit
