Exoprimal begins with a fictional news report that immediately cements the ridiculousness of its world. The world and its technology are under threat by dinosaurs. No more information is needed before jumping into this game and taking an assault rifle to hordes of angry lizards. As you play, it becomes apparent that a mysterious organisation is in need of exosuit pilots to jump into destroyed cities and lay waste to these dinos summoned by an AI gone rogue that, if left unchecked, could destroy everything. It’s our job to stop them with our sick-ass robot suits.
Upon its reveal there was a fear that Capcom was not only making a game with dinosaurs that wasn’t Dino Crisis, it was also leaning into live-service wholly unoriginal multiplayer trends that wouldn’t attract an audience. It’s not original, and might not be a huge draw, but it’s framed with a satirical bite that seems oddly aware of the repetition that comes from each match. The narrative justification is that an AI is forcing you to perform these tasks over and over again as you try and find a glitch in its programming. I haven’t played enough to figure out whether it’s fun enough to keep my interest, but first impressions are surprisingly positive. Maybe I’m just so easily pleased that anything with dinosaurs will wet my whistle.
Leviathan, the AI that has stranded you and your squad on a remote island where a dinosaur spewing anomaly has emerged, seems to have trapped countless different realities into this sick game of killing dinosaurs over and over and over while pitting exosuit pilots against one another. That’s where the multiplayer element comes from, as two teams of five are tasked with completing objectives and escorting a payload to a finishing line while fighting off endless hordes of dinosaurs alongside rival players brave enough to confront you. I’ve only played a couple of games thus far and experimented with a few exosuit variants, but there seems to be a decent amount of variety here with gameplay systems that feel mostly satisfying to use. Cutting hundreds of dinosaurs to pieces as they emerge from portals that appear out of nowhere hasn’t gotten old yet, mainly because there’s so damn many of them.
The narrative also progresses with each match similarly to Titanfall’s campaign, as cutscenes bookend the end of matches with your squad or new characters met on the field. I like the cheeky Australian guy who keeps calling me ‘Hard Case’ for some reason. No doubt he will sacrifice himself in the jaws of a T-Rex at the end of the first act or something. I’ve no idea if the story will cease to exist once I reach a certain point, or if Capcom has plans to go harder on certain themes and ideas with seasonal updates. There’s already a battle pass in here and progression paths for each of the exosuit, so there’s certainly potential to take it to some wild places. Not to mention the already announced Street Fighter 6 collaboration set to introduce robotic versions of Ryu and Ken. Exoprimal is well aware of its entire silly deal.
What we have here is a squad-based hero shooter that knows very well it’s a squad-based hero shooter, but only time will tell whether this self-awareness will be enough to attract an audience or keep its own mechanics fresh. A flaw is still a flaw even if you ironically start to draw attention to it, and right now it feels like Exoprimal has all the usual quirks of similar games, but with a narrative and atmosphere that wants to poke fun at the existence of live-service games we’re so obsessed with. Matches literally take place in a false reality in which a sarcastic AI makes you perform the same tasks over and over again with the false hope that things will change or get better if we keep on going. I can’t tell if Capcom is doing this on purpose or has inadvertently created a bizarre piece of digital performance art filled with dinosaurs. Either way, I’m invested enough at this point to find out.