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.