It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a good dinosaur game. There are not a lot of good dinosaur games out there. Capcom’s own Dino Crisis is long dead, and last year I ventured into a terribly regrettable project called Dino Summer where I played through all the dinosaur games on Steam, including a game so dysfunctional I had to refund it on stream. At the end of the tunnel, I carried out in my tiny T-Rex arms Jurassic World Evolution 2 and Parkasaurus, both excellent dinosaur games that I highly recommend, but also both city-builder management games. Is this what dinosaurs will be confined to? RTS games and Yoshi’s Wooly World? Cue Capcom, sabotaging their historically fantastic year of the Resident Evil 4 remake and Street Fighter 6 in one of the most confusing AAA projects ever conceived: Exoprimal.
Exoprimal is Overwatch with dinosaur hordes. I personally have logged nearly 1,000 hours into Blizzard’s hero shooter since its launch in 2016, making it my most played game ever by a mile. However, a few months after the disappointing launch of the microtransaction-riddled Overwatch 2 last year I finally uninstalled it for good. With the loss of Overwatch from my life, a game I played nearly every day for six years, I couldn’t find that feeling in any other similar title. But when I tentatively joined the Exoprimal beta earlier this year, the feeling hit me again right in the heart. Exoprimal‘s core gameplay takes a lot of inspiration from Overwatch, and its heroes sometimes seem like too much of a rip-off (you guys really needed a roller-skating healer with a green sound gun too?). I am burying the lead, however: Exoprimal is ridiculously fun to play, but everything else about it is a nightmare.
After logging in with a Capcom ID, which is mandatory, you’ll be treated to some well-rendered but ultimately pointless cutscenes in a near future sci-fi world. You’ll put together a player character in a pretty abysmal character creator and load them into the world of Exoprimal , joining a team of military scientists who are investigating the rifts that keep tearing open from the past and allowing hundreds of dinosaurs into the world. You head to a remote island and are trapped there, and must play a series of wargames hosted by an AI to find a way to escape. That’s about as much as I could understand from this plot, but it is so nonsensical I may as well have not even tried. It does not get better later on.
It’s not helpful that the story isn’t even delivered as a linear set of cutscenes, but as this strange digital labyrinth. You’ve got a circle of chip slots and as you play regular PvPvE matches you’ll sometimes unlock chips. You then manually plug them in to the slot they fit into on the chart, unlocking throwaway interactions between characters it is impossible to care about, and are eventually graced with a cutscene that is still just a series of 2D images on a board. All story components are boring, confusing, and infuriating all at once.
Next, we’ll head to the hangar, where I can outfit my Exosuits (heroes) with granular little RPG modules that will be familiar to anyone who has played Dead By Daylight or similar games. I have personally lost my patience with “Run 4% faster when at less than 30% health” and “+4% Poison Damage with Ranged Weapons”. Stop. Please, AAA gaming, I am begging you. You don’t need these things. They are ruining all your games. These are especially egregious in a PvP game like Exoprimal because of course you can pay for these upgrades with real money.
Five players will load into a “simulation” of a wargame, orchestrated by some big blue AI man for reasons beyond my comprehension. Before starting, you can select whether you’d like your final event to be PvP or PvE, with a small XP bonus for letting the game decide. For the record, every single time I let the game decide, the final event was a PvP fight. Exoprimal shines the second you get into the actual game, and you start to forget how bad everything else about it is. The controls are smooth, the shooting feels great, and each hero feels different to control and has different weight to their movement and attacks. The enimations are beautiful, the colors are distinct, and the UI is easy watch even with the insanely busy visuals of shooting a hundred dinosaurs. You can switch heroes any time to any role during matches, so battle is always fluid and fun.
Your team will see red outlines of the enemy team at all times, but they’re non-interactable. They are attempting to complete the same randomly generated objectives as your team on an identical course, making the first phase of the fight essentially a race. A blue orb called The Watcher will lead you around the large, fully destructible map to your next objective, which usually is “Dinosaur Cull” but is peppered in with boss fights against big dinos and special objectives like defending the point. The many different heroes’ powers flow together smoothly, and you really get the feeling that any combination of heroes following the 3 DPS-1 Tank-1 Healer composition is automatically successful. Exoprimal constantly gives players that satisfaction of being a good teammate, assuming someone will play healer. Literally everything about the actual gameplay just works.
The Watcher will constantly report if you’re moving faster or slower than the enemy team, which I really like; gets the adrenaline pumping! After moving through hordes of velociraptors, you’ll be transported to phase 2. If you chose PvE, it’ll likely just be another bigger horde. PvP offers a lot more variety, offering objectives that are identical to Splatoon‘s Tower Control and Splash Zone modes as well as all out free-for-all with the hordes. More objective types unlock later into the game, but it’ll take around 10 hours of playtime to get to them. I really enjoyed all these objectives, and truthfully one of my favorite gaming moments of the year was the camera panning up vertically to the top of a skyscraper, and watching for a full two minutes as thousands of raptors streamed down the side of the skyscraper towards me. It was honestly breath-taking.
A lot is going on in Exoprimal at all times, with hundreds of moving monsters, projectiles, characters, and UI elements on screen at any given time. I am happy to report that Exoprimal is one of the smoothest running games of all time – despite having to render 100 individual dinosaurs at once, and in an online match no less, I have not experienced a single frame rate drop. Not a single ping issue, either. I am playing the Steam version on my rig with an RTX 2060 Super and Ryzen 5 3600 CPU at 1440p 60 FPS locked on high graphics settings. I was honestly in shock watching a thousand individually rendered raptors attack me without any frame stutters. I have not seen a AAA PC game behave this smoothly at launch in years.
I tried out every character on the roster, and Roadblock (the one with the Reinhardt shield) is definitely my favorite. He gets a shield bash attack as well as an ability that calls aggro in a radius around him, so if you have a dependable healer you can pull off some pretty gnarly combos with your DPS teammates on the hordes. He’s also invaluable in the PvP segments, guarding the squad and the payload at the same time, and his ultimate is a tornado. Skywave is my favorite of the healers, and I had good fun with her flight abilities, but I found the DPS heroes to be kind of boring. I’m a tank main in Overwatch anyway, so this is all unsurprising. While fun to play, I must say all the Exofighters are missing a huge thing – personality. None of their designs or voice lines communicate personality of any kind, and I think that’s going to doom this game just as much as the monetization.
“Get behind me! I will be your shield!”Now, let’s get to why Exoprimal is a disaster. Although there are technically 10 heroes available at launch, which is still very few, three of them are locked behind a paywall. There is a loot box system which has a robot pull literal cards out at a blackjack table and deal items to you, which is about as predatory as gambling can get. These loot boxes can contain skins, emotes, sprays, and a variety of other useless things, but they also can include the in-game currency Bikcoin. You can also purchase skins directly for real money. Bikcoin is earned either by way of loot boxes or from the Premium Season Pass, which costs $10. Bikcoin can be used to purchase cosmetics like skins, but it can also be used to purchase mechanical upgrades for this PvP game. The Premium Season Pass generates multitudes more Bikcoin than the free game, and thus we end up with a pay-to-win situation. Here’s the kicker: this game costs 60 US Dollars.
Even in a free-to-play game, I would decry this monetization model as predatory. I would not recommend a pay-to-win game under any circumstance. But this comes after Capcom expects you to have already spent 60 of your hard-earned dollars on this cash vortex cesspool, and adds insult to injury in what just might be a new low for gaming. I know that nearly every single person playing Exoprimal right now, all 12 of you, is doing it through Xbox Game Pass. That doesn’t negate the fact that Capcom thinks they can charge full price for this and get away with it. It’s for these reasons that although it’s extraordinarily fun, I don’t recommend you play Exoprimal even with Game Pass.
I’ve been saving my killer fact for last, which is that although this game mandates you have a Capcom ID so that it can utilize full crossplay, which it does, Exoprimal does not have a function to let players squad up with friends on other platforms. You are understanding me correctly. Every game you play is in a pool with other players on every platform automatically, but in order to actually play with a friend on another platform, we just need to queue up at the same time and pray. Steam players cannot squad up with PC Game Pass Players either, so get that notion out of your head. As my review copy for Exoprimal was for Steam, I could not find a single individual to squad up with me to play. After all, who would pay $60 for this?
Exoprimal is a spectacular waste of an impressively fun core gameplay loop. At every turn, the fun is squandered by the over-complicated menus, crammed in RPG elements, inscrutable story progression, lack of heroes, and frankly disgusting monetization. Not to mention the fact that it only has a single game mode. I love playing this game, but I do not have the heart to continue playing it much longer. If this had launched free to play with just a battle pass and had all the pay-to-win modules removed, I could see this being a Game Pass smash hit, if only for a few months. As it is, Exoprimal would be difficult to fix without tearing the entire thing down and starting again. I hope you can hear the sad dinosaur noises in my writing as I tell you I do not recommend you play Exoprimal under any circumstances, Game Pass or not.
Nirav reviewed Exoprimal on PC with a key provided by the publisher. Exoprimal is also available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Game Pass.
