Exoprimal – did you play it over the weekend? (pic: Capcom)
Capcom’s peculiar dinosaur-themed co-op game has just completed its open beta, but is that enough to determine whether
With Resident Evil 4 remake turning out to be a triumph, Capcom is on a real hot streak at the moment. Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak and Resident Evil Village in VR were great too and the forthcoming Street Fighter 6 shows every sign of being equally impressive. But what about the decidedly more oddball Exoprimal?
All of those games are sequels and remakes and, despite the fervent hope of Dino Crisis fans, everything so far suggests that Exoprimal is a brand new IP. It’s also a major departure for Capcom, given that it’s multiplayer-only and will be released as a full price game; something that’s gone out of fashion lately, with the cementing of free-to-play and battle passes as the stock-in-trade of many publishers’ money-making efforts.
Exoprimal’s open beta at the weekend gave everyone a chance to see how it is shaping up, and to try out 10 of the game’s mech-like exosuits. Those are divided into three categories: assault, tank, and support, and the first piece of good news is that, like Overwatch, you can switch roles mid-round with no penalties. That’s useful because rounds are long and varied, taking in a range of objectives, as well as distinct PvE and PvP sections.
Starting in a cave with your five-person team, the beta’s matches began with a lengthy PvE section whose multiple objectives are solely based on wiping out incoming hordes of dinosaurs. A bit like Earth Defense Force, but primarily ground-based, you’d be assaulted by a legion of flimsy cannon fodder, which needed to be blown to bits swiftly and efficiently.
The PvE battles are all about speed. Each encounter is timed, and the team that dispatches their dino horde the quickest wins, making this a rush to unload as much ammunition as possible into the screen-filling swarm of prehistoric reptiles. With dozens, if not hundreds, of dinosaurs on screen at a time, and a dizzying volume of ordnance pouring into them, the chaos is extreme, and it’s to the game’s credit that this process is almost entirely glitch free.
It’s also pretty mindless, with tactics coming a distant second to simply dumping ammo, your various cooldowns the only impediment to wiping out greater volumes of enemies. At this stage of each round, snipers and support units seem largely irrelevant, as all you’re doing is annihilating throngs of puny lizards, interspersed with the odd mid-level beast that absorbs a few more rounds than usual, before going pop.
Each one of these encounters has a winner and a loser, your team’s final score in the PvE part of the level deciding who gets a minor advantage going into the PvP section. Oddly, we found that it was better to lose the opening areas, given the timing of the Dominator, a special power-up that lets one player summon and control a raging T-Rex.
It delivers quite a lasting and hard-to-defend attack on the opposing team, and while it may well be down to inexperience, with both the exosuits and their individual powers, we found it was always the deciding factor in PvP battles, even as we comfortably won most or all of the PvE objectives.
PvP is also the time when tactics, exosuit choice, and team talk become more important. Getting a tanky suit upfront, a sniper tucked into a cave or nearby niche, while someone else heals and buffs, leaves the other two team members to do opportunistic damage depending on what the enemy is doing to defend.
It’s at this point that the Dominator’s player-controlled T-Rex can make a brutal and pivotal difference, battering its way through what had previously been a solid frontline and support. That may well change as players get better at co-ordinating attacks, and as everyone gets more skilled at exploiting suits’ special abilities, but at the moment it just feels like a good old fashioned balancing issue.
Exoprimal – think Left 4 Dead with PvP and dinosaurs instead of zombies (pic: Capcom)
What does impress, though, is the game’s stability, which maintains its frame rate and performance even with inconceivable multitudes of dinosaurs onscreen. It’s a fine looking title, with immaculately drawn environments, both urban and rustic, as well as colourful dinosaurs, exosuits, and your personal, customisable pilot.
There are already rumblings about the pressure to buy a battle pass in a game that costs £50. With no monetisation in the beta, it’s impossible to know how this will pan out in the final release, but players remain on a hair trigger, ready to revolt if there’s any sign of pay to win or over-the-top microtransactions.
What the open beta demonstrates beyond doubt, however, is that Capcom has created another solid, well-made video game environment that’s more than a match for its 10-humans vs. hundreds of dinosaurs battles. The exosuits look good and have reasonably varied powers and while the dinosaurs themselves may be a bit undistinguished they arrive in such a massive flood that you barely have time to register what you’re shooting at before they’re gone.
There’s also a distinct and interesting tactical divide between the PvE and PvP sections of each map, which is likely to refine itself as players get more used to the suits and the roles they play at each stage. It’s an interesting interplay of hardware, skills, and reaction to the other team, which should only improve with experience and updates from Capcom.
Formats: Xbox Series X/S (previewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Release Date: 16th March 2023
Age Rating: 16
Capcom’s peculiar dinosaur-themed co-op game has just completed its open beta, but is it enough to judge what the final game will be like?
