Exoprimal can be roughly described as the result of asking a nine-year-old to describe “the coolest thing possible”. How so? Because you are a mech suit pilot who has been yoinked through time by a rogue AI in order to blow up ludicrous numbers of dinosaurs.
Now, there is more to the story than that headline description. There is an interesting plot, which focuses on your crew gathering enough knowledge and data to escape the mysterious island you have crashed on to and to discover the Leviathan AI’s intentions. There is an often-humorous set of supporting characters with distinct personalities and motivations. There is a well-balanced set of available exosuits with some fun abilities. There are in-match upgrade systems and comeback systems that can let you seize a last-minute victory. But if you do just want to switch your brain off and vaporise thousands of dinosaurs, or if you want to briefly be a dinosaur, Exoprimal has still got you covered.
Exoprimal is a PvPvE game where two rival teams of mech suit pilots (known in-game as exofighters) race against each other to complete sets of PvE objectives before either directly competing in a PVP fight or teaming up to take down a larger boss. Starting from the basic Dinosaur Cull objective, which simply requires slaughtering a few hundred dinosaurs, the range of objectives includes Overwatch-style payload-pushing, protecting a valuable NPC, capturing control points, and smashing sets of beacons with a giant hammer. Matches generally contain 3-4 objectives plus the final round, which is a fair length that doesn’t usually feel too rushed or too padded.
During PvE objectives, players can disrupt the rival team in one of two ways. Firstly, they can use a Dominator powerup: this summons a controllable dinosaur which is then transported into the enemy arena (similar to invading the other team’s map in Destiny 2‘s Gambit mode). In dino form, you can either attack the enemy players or contest their objective to slow their progress. Alternately, if you are falling far behind the other team, Leviathan may offer you a last-ditch Upgrade. If you are offered an upgrade, your team must find and kill special “trigger” enemies. Killing them quickly enough to appease Leviathan upgrades the other team’s game, making their enemies stronger and giving your team a chance to catch up.
Most of these events are explained in-game by Leviathan, in a cross between narrating and calling its attacks. Thankfully, Leviathan’s voice isn’t too robotic, so its narration doesn’t get annoying. The rules for each objective also appear in a panel while you’re waiting for the objective to load, which can be toggled on again afterwards, so its easy to access the information you need in the moment. While many aspects of the UI are designed well, and a few elements such as the navigation line are almost too hand-holding, a few small parts confusingly miss that standard. The most annoying mis-step for me is that there is no way to see the abilities that each exosuit has unless you are in a match. This is an issue when trying to upgrade an exosuit, as it can be hard to know which equippable modules would work best with a suit’s abilities when you can’t see what those abilities are.
Speaking of abilities, each of the ten exosuits available in the base game have 3 abilities, a super ability, and an equippable item. Some of these abilities remind me of powers seen in other games, most notably Overwatch and Destiny 2, but they are not direct copies. Exoprimal combines and tweaks existing ideas to create a set of characters that are familiar enough to be quickly understandable, but not so familiar that they feel like characters pasted in from another game.
One area where Exoprimal strongly differs from both games I just mentioned, and from most games in general, is how it unfurls its plot. This is where Capcom have taken their largest risk, and at the moment I don’t know how well that risk will work out. Exoprimal contains no traditional story levels or missions. Instead, story beats and cutscenes are unlocked through playing enough matches of the main Dino Survival mode, which is the only available mode for a long time, and then watching and reading the data uncovered by those matches.
The gathered data goes further into the history of the island on which Exoprimal takes place, the reason for the initial dinosaur outbreak in 2040, and the role that the corporation who built the mech suits and trained the pilots played in destabilising the island. Analysing this data and reaching progressive story beats unlocks new objectives, new enemies, and new map areas, which are justified in-story as Leviathan “evolving” the wargame to refine the data it is gathering from your team. If multiple people in the lobby are at a high level and have played quite a lot of matches, then more varied mission objectives and stronger enemies like the experimental Neosaurs become increasingly likely to appear.
In contrast, if anyone in the lobby is playing their first match, that match will open with Leviathan’s introductory speech that explains more about the wargames and what each team needs to do. The special mission variants that include plot-relevant characters also happen randomly when loading into Dino Survival matches, roughly based on the progress of the lobby overall.
I think that Capcom used this approach as a way to have a live-service game and a story-based game with an unfolding plot at the same time, without having to lock players in to only being able to matchmake with people at the same level of story progression. I can appreciate that they are trying to do something slightly new with familiar genres, and I like that the story progression is partially tied to how much players care about advancing and discovering the story.
However, there is one major flaw with this approach: it’s never communicated fully in-game. As result, new players don’t know that they expand their options by playing and by exploring the story data, unless someone tells them or they look the game up on forums / social media. In my case, a couple of friends started playing on the day before I did, and explained the principle to me during my first match.
Unfortunately, this approach also means that the opening of the game is the most likely part to put someone off, because the first couple of hours demonstrate only a proportion of what the game can do, and also don’t offer players the usual UI clues like blocked maps or locked missions that would show players that more is to come. Most of the negative reviews on the Xbox store are from people who played for a couple of hours, believed the game only had one mode, a few types of dinosaur, and 2-3 maps, and did not want to spend further time on such a seemingly limited game. That’s a shame, but I can see why it happened.
I think that if the evolving nature of Exoprimal is made clearer from its start, that would massively reduce the risk of people either leaving before they get to the best parts, or developing a false impression of the game. The simplest way to communicate its approach would be to have Leviathan explicitly say in the opening match that if you succeed then they will evolve the wargame to challenge you further. Another option would be for a supporting character like fellow pulled-through-time pilot Magnum to tell the player character about how they’ve been thrown into new places and seen tougher enemies as they’ve lived through more matches. A more involved but potentially cooler option, that doesn’t rely solely on dialogue, would be for Leviathan to start bringing in a advanced enemy much too early (e.g. during the 4th or 5th match), have it overwhelm the team, and then for Leviathan to pull the team back and tell them that they aren’t trusted with that challenge yet … but that the team might be ready if they survive the current match.
While the way that the game’s design is communicated has its issues, the design itself is strong. All of the main elements of Exoprimal, such as its performance, stability, and visuals, are well-constructed and put together. As it uses the RE engine used for Resident Evil games, you can expect very high-quality cutscenes, while the exosuits and the larger boss dinosaurs are also detailed and fitting. The environments are a comparative weak spot; while they are never bad, they are fairly nondescript aside from at the focal points where specific battles happen. But that seems like a necessary compromise made to keep performance consistent even when there are over 1,000 dinosaurs on screen alongside the visual effects from the team’s abilities.
Luckily, that compromise seems to have paid off. After 12 hours of play, I’ve failed to join a match due to server issues twice, I’ve lost connection mid-match zero times, and experienced a visual glitch once. I’ve had no noticeable lag issues or performance issues, even when the gameplay is so chaotic that screenshots can’t convey what is going on. That’s a standard that many larger games fail to meet even after patches and hotfixes, so well done Capcom. (Ok, less “well done” and more “at least you cleared the low bar”).
In a similar manner, the monetisation in Exoprimal is only ok overall, but its quite fair by 2023 standards. The base price is £50, but I think Capcom are aiming to rely on the revenue from a larger audience buying one or two battle passes rather than hoping that a smaller fanbase pay the full price. While being a nearly-full-price game that still has a battle pass isn’t exactly a good thing, Exoprimal does do one aspect of monetisation very fairly: it does not have premium currency nor an in-game real money store.
The customisation screen shows all of the options available – which at the moment are exosuit skins, weapon skins, charms, and emotes – and clearly labels whether each option is bought using the single in-game currency, unlocked as part of the battle pass, or bought as part of a cosmetic pack from the Microsoft store. I like this approach, because the tiny bit of friction of going into the Microsoft store to buy the item, and the visible reminder that these items cost real money, will be enough to jolt some people, sometimes, out of an impulsive purchase. Also, although there are loot boxes, they are only given out as level-up rewards and cannot be bought, which is great to see.
Overall
Exoprimal is “here for a good time, not a long time” personified (err, dino-ified?). My time spent with the game will be weeks, or maybe months, rather than years, but they will definitely be fun weeks. I hope that Capcom prioritise communicating how the progression system works, to make sure that the game is given a fair chance and that fewer people come away with the wrong idea about it after a couple of hours of play.
Except for a few oversights, such as the current lack of cross-platform parties and some important information about how the plot develops not being communicated effectively, the game feels like its been designed thoughtfully and built well. It performs solidly, does not have any networking issues, and has a well-designed set of exosuit roles that feel distinct and fun to use. Its microtransactions are non-predatory so far, which is another vote in its favour.
Ultimately, Exoprimal is going in my Cool tier, because how can a game with this much of a cool factor go anywhere else?