It should be impossible to make dinosaurs boring. I’d watch hours of David Attenborough describing how a Stegosaurus chews its plants to aid digestion, so firing a sniper rifle at an attacking T-Rex should be the most fun I could ever have. Dinosaurs are cool by default, why do you think Jurassic Park is considered such a classic movie? Steven Spielberg may be an all-time great director and Jeff Goldblum may be a smoking hot fountain of chaos, but the dinosaurs are the real stars of that film.
Exoprimal cheats by adding mechs – the coolest thing you can add to any game – turning it from a dino shooter to a dino versus mechs shooter. Capcom has taken two of the coolest possible things and pitted them against one another, putting you in the pilot’s seat. So how is it so boring?
Exoprimal starts off with a tutorial, helping you to get to know your suit. While it’s pretty intuitive as shooters go – push your right trigger to fire, left joystick to move – not everyone is as well-versed in the genre as me, so I get it. Games need tutorials. After the tutorial there’s a long cutscene to set the story up, but it didn’t really pull me in. I’m here to shoot dinosaurs, so let me unload some lead.
Upon landing planetside and being faced with a swarm of velociraptors, I was practically cocking my rifle before being forcibly removed from the fight and thrown into another tutorial. By this point, as the game taught me about completing missions as if I couldn’t have worked this out on the go, all the initial excitement of loading up the dinosaur murder game had dissipated. I was bored, the game had lost me, and not even decapitating a Tyrannosaurus with a space laser got me in the mood.
It wasn’t just the intro that turned me off. I returned to Exoprimal for another bite at the prehistoric cherry after my initial foray into Tutorial City, heading straight into some co-op battles. Sadly, my experience was no better in a live environment.
The dinosaurs themselves are cannon fodder. Shooting at a horde of raptors feels exactly the same as unloading a clip into the flank of a towering Stegosaurus, and the attacks of each beast feel similar too. Pachycephalosauruses charge at you, heads lowered, and you brace for a devastating impact. Except, it never comes. The souped-up headbutt is more of a tickle, hardly staggering you and inflicting the same amount of screen shake as a pesky raptor bite.
The dinosaurs don’t feel like the aggressive reptiles they’re made out to be, and even the biggest ones don’t feel particularly dangerous. T-rexes are just raptors with more health, big bullet sponges that don’t offer anything interesting tactically. Shoot, shoot, laser beam, shoot, shoot, dead dino.
The problems with the dinosaurs all feeling a little samey are compounded when you come face to face with the opposing team of meched-up soldiers. In contrast to the dinos, each mech feels very different to pilot, armed not only with vastly varying abilities, but also moving and feeling different. The thunderous footsteps of Roadblock shake your screen and its ponderous gait befits its massive structure. Compare piloting that with manoeuvering Nimbus on its nimble rollerblade-esque feet, and you’ve got two very different playstyles in terms of both mechanics and vibes.
The opposing team may be made up of any combination of mechs, meaning you have to adapt on the fly to any number of tactical configurations. It feels very Overwatch as you escort your package in the opposite direction to your opponents, and that moment of PvP action is better than any of the PvE dinosaur fights along the way.
It’s a shame that the dinosaur portions of the Exoprimal feel so lacklustre, because it could be a brilliant game if the AI-controlled reptiles had a bit more about them. It would still have all those annoying live-service trappings, sure, but upgrading your mech to tackle all manner of prehistoric foes would feel so much more satisfying. If there was more dino danger, there would be a bigger sense of accomplishment when your mobile extinction event fires the hordes into oblivion, and the PvP skirmishes would feel more fraught because of the added threat.
Exoprimal’s stellar premise of pitting mechs against dinosaurs gave it an open goal. All it needed to do was calmly pass the ball into the net, but instead it skied the ball way over the bar. Exoprimal makes dinosaurs boring, a task previously thought impossible. It’s a crying shame, because this could have been so much fun.