Exoprimal Feels Like A Game Born Into Extinction

Looking back at my hands-on time with Exoprimal, I’m surprised that despite trying to be coy and giving the game the customary benefit-of-doubt you give a game that’s not yet ready for a full release, I expressed a lot of reservations; weightless combat, an awkward solitary game mode, and a general messiness that at best felt like it was only going to appeal to a fairly small subsection of gamers seduced by the promise of mechs and dinosaurs.

Now that it’s out, I can’t help but wonder why Capcom didn’t opt to revive one of its other brilliant dino IPs, like the oft-requested Dino Crisis or the at-least-twice requested (by Josh Furr and my good self) Cadillacs and Dinosaurs. But beyond just wishing they did something else, it’s painfully clear—not for the first time—that Capcom really struggles to get its house in order when it comes to making an online shooter.

First up, Exoprimal has a rather bizarre level-gating system, whereby you unlock new match types the higher-level you are. I can appreciate the concept, as technically more of the game unlocks as you progress the story, but in what’s essentially a match-based online shooter (rather than, say, a more open Destiny-style game), that’s an extremely high-risk way of trying to retain an audience. It means there’s a lot of repetition of the same maps and modes in the early going, and truth be told I’m yet to feel the variety several levels in.

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A big part of that level-gating risk is tied to the fact that Exoprimal is a Game Pass release, where I’m guessing a big proportion of its early audience will be playing the game, and in turn cutting into its sales on Steam and other platforms. Now, I’m a fan of Game Pass, but the risk of it for developers is that you’ll get people playing your game who haven’t invested $60 into buying it, and so aren’t invested in sticking with the game to get their money’s worth.

It’s something I’ve spoken about with a few developers, including Weird West’s Raph Colantonio. When your game is debuting on that Game Pass buffet, you need to really keep the player’s attention on your game, and gating the bulk of an online shooter’s content for the sake of what I’ve so far found to be a pretty uninteresting story is not a good way to go about it. Game Pass players have simply no reason to put in the legwork, and that could quickly decimate a chunk of the game’s audience.

I used to see Game Pass as a great avenue for new multiplayer games to thrive, but over the years it’s possible that the opposite is the case. It didn’t manage to sustain Day One Gane Oass games like Back 4 Blood and the grossly underrated Lemnis Gate, while other Day One releases like the also-ailing Warhammer 40,000: Darktide have struggled to implement ‘crossplay’ with Steam and therefore fragmented the audience. With your multiplayer game always competing against a bunch of readily available others, Game Pass can in fact be pretty brutal for an online shooter that doesn’t immediately get your attention.

On that note, Exoprimal has crossplay matchmaking across PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, which seems all but essential, but that crossplay comes with limitations. Specifically, you can’t party up with people and friends across different platforms, so if your friend plays on PS5 and you on PC, then the only way you’ll play together is through blind luck (same goes for PC Game Pass and Steam, annoyingly). Supposedly this is due to how the different platforms handle friends lists, but other games like Age of Empires 2, Rocket League, and even the infamous Redfall let you party up with friends across different ecosystems, so I call nonsense on that one. They just failed to implement this crucial multiplayer feature.

You’d have thought that forcing you to create a Capcom ID to play Exoprimal would at least have the benefit of letting you connect with friends cross-platform using Capcom’s systems, but no dice.

And on the game itself? To me it’s mediocre. Matches have an awkward flow and can often feel protracted and repetitive. And who really wants to be forced into Time Trials against another team when you’re trying to blow hundreds of dinos away PvE? It just feels like a trashy arcade game layer straight from the 90s. There’s something to be said for the fast-swapping mech suits and unique abilities you can don, and novel ideas like invading other players’ matches as a dinosaur, but I’m constantly baffled at how a game like this just doesn’t feel more spectacular. The physics are stiff, the environments are dull, and it totally lacks that ‘GAHHHHH’ balls-to-the-wall feeling of swarm shooters like Vermintide, Left 4 Dead, or Deep Rock Galactic.

There aren’t many reviews yet, but the consensus so far isn’t showing me to be some kind of outlier here. The fewer-than-1000 Steam reviews at the time of writing, four days since it came out, mark it as Mostly Positive, which spectacular when you consider that many of these reviews are coming from the true believers and people who chose to preorder rather than take the far less committal route of PC Game Pass.

It’s bizarre to me how misdirected Exoprimal feels, though Capcom’s quality with online service games has always been extremely variable. Sure, you have your Monster Hunters and Street Fighters on the one hand, but when it comes to online shooters you’re mostly looking at a pretty bad legacy of those free Resident Evil multiplayer modes (and don’t even get me started on Umbrella Corps). Something those failed experiments share with Exoprimal is an eccentric vision to try something different, but with an oddly flat execution that has the longevity and tone of a lightgun arcade game rather than a serious long-term service game.

In the case of Resident Evil Re:Verse, it was always just a free game, so why should Capcom care that only about 10 people are playing it despite it only coming out last year. But with Exoprimal, it feels like a free-to-play game with a premium price tag, and even though Capcom is committed to Exoprimal for at least three Seasons (until January 2024), I just don’t see how it’s going to stick.

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