MECHS APPEAL

Welcome to EXOPRIMAL, where everybody's gone to the raptors

-  Phil Iwaniuk

It's raining dinosaurs. It's literally raining dinosaurs. I've absorbed a lot of gaming elevator pitches in my time, and Exoprimal's preposterous conceit is about as strong as they get - at least on a primal level. You look at a purple miasma forming in the sky, you watch a tide of velociraptors pour forth from it, and you say to yourself: I am absolutely going to be shooting at that.

I got a bit more conflicted after scratching that itch. Capcom's five-person PvPvE hero shooter is enjoyable. It has some fantastic ideas. And almost all of them carry frustrating limitations around their neck. In short, Exoprimal's launch state feels more like an Early Access phase than a finished game.

Before any extinct hides can be perforated, there's a surprising amount of narrative setup: it's 2043, and space-time rifts are popping up all over, spilling dinosaurs into the civilised world and stranding a crack team of gun-toting types on Bikitoa Island where an AI named Leviathan runs combat experiments for an unknown purpose. Luckily for us all, the Aibius corporation has sunk huge amounts of cash into developing exosuits to help organisations like our Hammerheads fight back against the hordes.

I didn't need this much detail to incentivise the shooting of dino tides, but we have it anyway and it doesn't hurt. As you progress new text logs and cutscenes are added to the archive, a giant radial menu that slowly uncovers the mystery behind the dino-thunderstorms, the rifts, Aibius and the AI. It brings to mind Dead Rising's piece-by-piece exposition mechanic, rewarding your game time with the next piece of the jigsaw. Gamifying even the way the story is told works surprisingly well: I found my lizard brain stimulated by each new chunk of information even though I had little connection with the characters.