Exoprimal Preview: Closed Network Test Impressions

ign.com:

It feels wise that Exoprimal, a game that opens with a futuristic weather forecast that suggests the foreseeable future will be cloudy with a chance of raptors, doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself. At its core, if you’ve played a Gears of War Horde mode session, or a few rounds of Destiny 2’s Gambit, then you’ll likely feel at home with what a round of this reptile blaster has to offer. In its first very limited closed playtest, Exoprimal shows a solid foundation for a PvPvE shooter, and if it sticks with its strengths like the time attack-style objective racing and interesting class design, it could be well worth sinking your teeth into.

The meat of a round of Exoprimal sees a team of five running through a stage, stopping at points to complete small sub-objectives, all of them involving shooting dinosaurs that are falling out of singularities in the sky. Usually this means you need to kill a certain amount of them before moving on, or protect a static location or object from them for a period of time. It’s not just waves of speedy raptors chomping at your heels either. As levels progress, so do the variety of dinos that appear. The demo didn’t reveal too much of its hand here, but there were occasional flying pteranodons and neosaurs, mutated bipedal baddies that can shoot projectiles or explode when you get near them. The enemy mixes were dynamic enough that progressive waves weren’t just a cake walk.

Enemy teams are doing the same thing as you, but concurrently. An opaque overlay of them can be seen between objectives, giving you a hint of where they are on the list in comparison to you. This indirect PvP was a great bit of tension that reminded me of a ghost car in a racing game, constantly motivating your