Exoprimal reveals its massive twist too late in the game

Exoprimal makes a terrible first impression.

The mixed-media opening mixes a breaking news segment with a corporate recruiting campaign, and somehow the game manages to make its absurd (if refreshingly unserious) premise border impossible for the foreseeable future. But hold on, let me try: Cracks in the fabric of space-time have brought hordes of dinosaurs to Earth, necessitating the fabrication of exosuits to repel the invasion, as well as an advanced artificial intelligence called Leviathan, whose main assignment is to train fighters and monitor the operation.

You play as Ace, a dim-witted rookie who joins a patrol team soon stranded in an alternate timeline, where a rogue Leviathan forces exosuits to participate in endless wargames disguised as combat tests. These wargames manifest as 5v5 player-versus-environment-versus-player multiplayer matches, where you push through a series of cooperative dinosaur defense objectives, while translucent phantoms indicate the location of your human enemies, showing you whether to speed up or take it easy.

Complete your tasks, however, and suddenly both teams are thrust onto the same playing field as a final assignment looms, and this is where the magic happens. You can now directly hinder the enemy by blowing up their cargo or playing a sneaky prank. Oh, and if you pick up one of the randomly spawning “Dominator” power-ups, you can transform into a Triceratopsteleport into enemy territory and wreak havoc.

Unfortunately, in the slow opening times, Exoprimal makes it terrifyingly easy to write it off as another live-service hero shooter lurking in Overwatch’s shadows. The regiment of 10 exosuits that you can hot-swap between includes a shield-carrying tank, a skate support, and a katana-wielding sling. Their biomechanical designs and fleshy, plastic sofa innards are beautiful to look at, but the door is wide open to hateful comparisons, and I felt tempted to make them – until I fell in love with my main.

Barrage is a fiery-haired mix of Team Fortress 2‘s Demoman and Junkrat from Overwatch. He pumps bouncy explosives with a satisfying punch and has a complementary stun grenade to clump raptors together. ExoprimalThe game’s mechanics are tight and well up to Capcom’s high standards – the stringing together of these button presses is a satisfying kinetic process that allows you to enter a flow state of chaos. In the case of Barrage, this ends with its ultimate, where you can turn into a giant missile and destroy an entire five-piece human players.

Despite briefly moonlighting like a sniper far from the action, embracing the more immediate chaos as Barrage made me quickly understand the assignment. Exoprimal is at its best when your team doesn’t double down on colors, allowing for maximum synergy. It’s so satisfying to launch grenades at the horde and watch Skywave’s gravity pull the dinosaurs together as Roadblock unleashes a tornado of doom.

Image: Capcom via Polygoon

However, since each suit has its own progression system, there’s little reason to switch once you’ve found your favorite, which is a great shame in the first place considering the effort that went into making the builds of the 10-strong roster, but it also creates inevitable team composition issues once a meta hardens. Exoprimal. As hard as it would have been to give up being a Barrage lifer, I would rather not have been able to double the colors within a team to maximize potential tactical creativity.

Anyway, I gradually learned how to replenish my team’s skills as I climbed through the skill ranks, assigning and upgrading modules that changed my hero’s skills in meaningful ways. It quickly became apparent that Capcom’s latest is a very different kind of hero shooter, one where it’s much more about efficiency and communication than being “cracked.”

Like the food critic in RatatouilleI was taken back to a halcyon time when esports skills weren’t so coveted, and it was more about having fun pushing a load with your friends on Gold rush or fight through the mobs in the mall Death center. However, these feelings are fleeting, like Exoprimal can often be its own worst enemy. Between matches, you’ll suffer through the mockumentary dialogue of a ship’s crew that feels like a watered-down Guardians of the Galaxy, begrudgingly clicking through a branching “analysis map” of mysteries, watching the tracker tap to your next reward – a jargon-filled cutscene. The loop can crunch in the early game, as there’s a distinct lack of mission variety for several hours and only a handful of maps… until something truly disarming happens.

[Ed. note: The following contains gameplay spoilers for Exoprimal.]

Image: Capcom via Polygoon

After about a dozen 30-minute matches of Dino Survival, you start matchmaking in what appears to be a standard multiplayer game, only to discover that one of your Aussie NPC comrades has invaded and joined your team to gather some data (and to call Leviathan “fucked in the head”). This shared-world storytelling event infuriates the rogue AI, which begins to break the rules of the wargame, while you still race to defeat the enemy team as usual. Mutated dinosaurs rear their heads, as well as a thousand strong swarms of pterodactyls and new, more engaging mission objectives, such as defending a VTOL or charging a hammer to breach area barriers.

This paradigm shift is changing Exoprimal significantly, with the introduction of new maps, a healthy level of difficulty, heist bosses, and finally some real narrative intrigue. It’s a very confusing pacing decision where you’re abruptly playing a completely different, arguably much better game several hours later, one that basically sets a fascinating precedent for future multiplayer storytelling shenanigans. In the game’s universe, this is canonized as a “firmware update” – which makes sense, but I wish it had come much sooner, or at least communicated better in the game’s marketing, as many players may not get access to Exoprimal‘s best assets before bouncing out of his boring early hours.

A seasonal live service roadmap promises a time-based endgame mode, variant exosuits, and a Monster Hunter team-up in the near future, which, as a player now trapped in the game’s clutches, is an exciting prospect. Exoprimal is rough around the edges, but hopefully, by the time these updates arrive, it will have found the nostalgic audience that its immersive experimental story so deserving, rather than going the way of the dinosaurs.

Exoprimal was released on July 14 on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PS5 using a pre-release download code from Capcom. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.