I sure wish I liked Exoprimal. The concept - teams of friends battling their way through dinosaurs while completing objectives - is intriguing, but despite its ambition it is abundantly clear this game is being held back by unfortunate choices. The plot is a convoluted mess, a contrived series of events involving time bubbles and sentient AI, one which sees both dinosaurs being plucked out of the past and players stuck in an eternal loop battling them inside of giant robot suits to, essentially, "gain information to build better giant robot suits." The gameplay is, well... it's a live service hero shooter with an in-game currency called BikCoin.
That's the biggest problem with Exoprimal - none of it feels original. Each of the different exosuits players can choose from have their own abilities and everyone on the team should pick the right combination of exosuits in order to each other properly. Some are tanks, some are healers, some are glass cannons, one is basically a ninja... this has all been done before. The difference this time, of course, is that there are a lot of real (yet featherless) dangerous dinosaurs thrown into the mix, but even my inner paleontologist couldn't save me from feeling like this concept would have been better as a single-player Dino Crisis title.
Teams Are Everything
Just because something is unoriginal doesn't mean it can't be fun, but Exoprimal is really only fun when everyone is firing on all cylinders. Like most team-based shooters players are encouraged to work together, pick appropriate ing classes, and use their powers in tandem to assist each other in hectic moments. If everyone is fully engaged and paying attention, this makes for quite enjoyable dino-slaying mayhem. If even two of your team stray slightly off course, however, it's likely all of you will suffer the consequences. Death comes quick in Exoprimal if everyone in the team isn't playing to their strengths, and never is that more true than in the final stage of each match.
Multiplayer gameplay in Exoprimal works like this: Players (five on one team and five on another) are tasked with a series of challenges, most of which are variations on "follow the glowing line to reach the area" missions. You and the other four of your team move to these areas, clear out the dinosaurs by whatever means necessary, and then move to the next zone. As you proceed, translucent images of the other team are overlaid on the screen along with some text, letting you know "You are completing challenges faster [and/or slower] than the other team."
Once this gauntlet is complete, each team is transferred into a separate map for one final challenge - and this time, both teams are in the same place. Now there's a new goal - sometimes it's a variation of "Capture The Base", sometimes it's a dreadfully tedious "Escort the slow-moving object" quest - but the important difference is that now the five players on your team can impede (and attack) the other team, after being separate up until this point. Also, the dinosaurs are still there, and every now and then one of your team can turn into a dino themselves.
If it's not clear by that sentence, this is when the game gets fun. While during the previous rounds the announcement of the other team's progress seemed only to either boost or lower your team's ego, it's important to note Exoprimal also lets the first team to finish enter this final arena before the other team, which means that a good performance in previous battles leads to a serious advantage in the final round.
A Few Too Many Restrictions On Fun
Even with that, however, there's a lot of caveats. Players can only become dinosaurs for a limited amount of time, and while turning into a tyrannosaur does give you the ability to completely decimate the other team (if they can be caught unaware), leaving the rest of your own team one member down can really put them at a disadvantage. The action is frantic, explosive, and disorienting even when it's just one group versus hundreds of swarming dinos. Once a whole other team s the fray in the final battle, it's important to be as tactical as possible. Communication between teammates is key in Exoprimal, and if all five players aren't completely focused things will likely get bad very quickly.
There are people who will really enjoy Exoprimal for this team-based 5v5 (v Dinosaur) mayhem, but the fact that this is yet another online multiplayer live service game to come with purchasable accessories, player levels, Survival es, and "that menu screen" feels out of place in 2023. There is an interesting core concept in Exoprimal's story despite (or maybe even because of) its convoluted nature, and the striking visual imagery of seeing a portal suddenly emerge and drop hundreds of velociraptors in front of you, their bodies flopping and landing as if they were dumped out of a cardboard box by some careless zookeeper, is lovely. I just wish it didn't all feel so hollow.
Exoprimal launches on PC, PS5, PS4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on July 14, 2023. Screen Rant was invited to an in-person hands-on supervised gameplay session of the PC version for this preview.
