DevinMayCry
3 reviews liked by DevinMayCry
Exoprimal
2023
Exoprimal is kind of a weird game. It’s the latest game from Capcom and they had revealed it awhile ago and it seemed almost universally panned from the get go. Hearing it’s a PvP game and it also just not being Dino Crisis I think a lot of people just reflexively deemed it to be trash upon seeing it. I was actually excited for this game since it looked like such a cool hash up of a lot of games I love. And I’m happy to report that I was not disappointed!
TLDR at the end
What is Exoprimal?
Exoprimal is an absolutely absurd and fantastic game. There’s so many different things going on at once that it’s not easily explained. It’s a co-op horde shooter akin to something like Left 4 Dead but you have hero shooter style characters where they all have different kits and abilities while also simultaneously being a PvP race to the finish against another team where the team can invade you or do various things to slow down your progress. Then at the end of the mission you either enter a specific PvEvP area where you and the enemy team duke it out trying to complete various objects alongside hoards of dinosaurs, a more intense PvE race to the finish or a 10 player co-op raid style missions with boss fights. And I fucking love every single piece of this game. This combines some of my favorite genres into one. I love co-op hoard shooters like L4D2, hero shooters like Overwatch and Battleborn (R.I.P. Battleborn) and I love weird PvEvP experiences like Destiny’s Gambit or Gigantic, although I didn’t play Destiny much, what I did play was focused around Gambit. I think the love stems from how much League of Legends I played when I was younger and I love seeing Moba mechanics or ideas added to other genres. Especially shooters!
Now I don’t think this game is for everyone. I think there’s elements of this game that everyone can enjoy, but I think the collective package is going to hit everyone differently. Which seems to be the sentiment among Steam reviews and actual reviews I’ve seen. But I come here today as a lover of weird PvEvP games such as Battleborn, Gigantic and Gambit. I come here with a love of horde shooters like Left 4 Dead 2, Vermintide, Deep Rock and more. I come here with a love of the Moba formula from my history of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm. And this game is absolutely what I wanted and honestly more.
Gameplay
At its core the game is a 5v5 race to complete various objectives assigned to you in that match. There’s a pretty decent variety of objectives ranging from killing all the dinosaurs summoned, protecting specific zones, capturing points and more. What’s a little strange is that when you first start out playing you’re actually pretty limited to the various objectives you get in the matches. Objectives are locked behind story progression which is a cool idea in theory and does allow for things to get introduced at a nice pace, if it was paced out correctly. I’ll get into that more later though. Generally the objective race is finished with some sort of capstone objective which is likely fighting stronger dinosaurs or there’s special events like the Raptor Cascade. Where it gets very cinematic and thousands upon thousands of raptors are spawned in. There’s quite a few different ones like this but the Raptor Cascade is by far my favorite.
Raptor Cascade
Then after that you’re teleported to a PvP zone (or it can be extended PvE race) which is where I think this game really shines. That’s when things get the most chaotic. Depending on how much better you were doing than the enemy team you can get a pretty substantial head start in the PvP area. Much like the objectives during the race, there’s different ones you can get at the end like a payload escort, capture points, and more. But these are also locked behind story progression. And for the start of the game you primarily are getting data cube escorts. During the final event teams will get these things called Dominators, which allow you to invade and attack the enemy team as a dinosaur. What you get for invading depends on how far ahead or behind you are to the enemy team. Generally if you’re really behind you’ll get rewarded with a T. Rex, otherwise you could get a Triceratops or a Carnotaurus which seems to be the lowest tier of the invading dinosaurs. But I personally prefer the Carnotaurus over the Triceratops but I think it’s because the Triceratops is a little harder to use. The dominator is really fun and is a really cool comeback mechanic to the game which I think is needed, because otherwise it can be a total stomp if you have no way to slow down the enemy. There’s another comeback mechanic too! This one is called the Neo Trigger Saur. The game summons a gold dinosaur that you can kill, and then from there it grades you on how fast you’re killing dinosaurs and will cause an upgraded dinosaur threat to the enemy team. It’s a really cool mechanic in my eyes. Generally that’s how a match will play out. There’s some story missions that are really cool and will always play out the same, as in the same events but those events are so fucking badass. All of this together creates such a crazy chaotic blend of action that is so cool that I can’t help but to smile while playing this game. And the amount of dinosaurs you get swarmed with can be quite terrifying. Some matches spawn in a Stegosaurus, a T. Rex and a Carnotaurus along with the thousands of raptors getting spawned in and it can become extreme chaos. It’s also important to note that if you ever completely wipe in an event it will reset the event. But if just one person goes down you can either wait for the respawn timer or someone can pick you up.
Classes
In the game you have access to a total of 10 playable Exosuits (7 when you first start), which is what the game calls its different classes/characters you can play. These classes are separated by DPS, Tank and Support. Much like a hero shooter. There’s no role enforcement of any kind and there’s no restrictions to what one person can be in a match. Which is a blessing and a curse. I generally like having the freedom to create whatever composition I want with my teammates but at the same time it’s frustrating when the team is 3 tanks and 2 DPS with no healer. That happened occasionally and it was very frustrating, but for the most part a lot of people seemed to understand the general roles that were needed. What’s nice, is that if you go into a match with an Exofighter but you want to change to say a healer since you don’t have one, you can. You can change characters anytime during a match. You’ll exit your current suit and be just a person running around with a weak assault rifle. If you do it during the down time between objectives it is an instant change but if you do it while an objective is going you’ll have to wait for a cooldown. This is nice to be able to change on the fly and to any role and to be able to have duplicates of any role. Every Exosuit comes with its own set of abilities. I think universally every character has 1 movement ability while the others can vary from damage abilities, blocking abilities, crowd control and more. Every character also has an ult much like your standard hero shooter. What’s nice is if you swap between characters mid match though you actually retain your ult charge.
I personally found that all the Exosuits were really fun to play, some fit my playstyle more than others, but every role had at least 1 suit I loved. I won’t go over every single one but I just want to highlight some of my favorites. My personal favorites were Deadeye, Barrage, Krieger, and Skywave. Which I think my personal favorites being half the available roster is a testament to how fun the various classes are.
Customization and Progression
The fun doesn’t just end with the various exosuits. Every Exosuit has its own progression system where you level up and you can unlock modules for them. The modules range from general buffs like adding more base health, faster ult charge, some knockback resistance and more. While others are character specific and usually alter the way a character’s ability operates to some degree. Some are more impactful than others. There were definitely a few modules that I don’t even think I bothered looking at in my time playing. But the character progression system they have in place I think feels really good. I think in 90% of my matches my account level leveled up, whatever suit I was using their level went up and I was constantly getting something.
As some may already know, the game is a live service so it having all sorts of progression systems should be no surprise. And I will address concerns I have about that later but I think overall the game is very generous with its progression and nothing ever felt like a grind to me while playing. As a matter of fact I unlocked things pretty instantly when available.
Story
I think for me the most surprising thing about this game was the story. It’s by no means a great story that can stand next to the narrative giants of the industry. But it’s that capcom camp and dialed to 100. It’s such a good, stupid, schlocky science fiction story involving AI, Mechs, Multiple Dimensions, Time Travel, Dinosaurs, AI artificially created Dinosaurs, corporations being bad and greedy. Basically it’s got almost every single science fiction trope all wrapped up in one package and it just works. Plus the way they have the characters written and voiced they just crack me up and are all very personable. I actually burst out laughing a few times playing this game and watching the cutscenes. I won’t really spoil the details of the story past here since I unironically think it’s worthwhile to see for yourself. Primarily only if you like schlocky sci-fi action plots. It’s campolicious.
Issues and Concerns
While this review has mostly been glowing, I do have concerns about this game. As I’ve noted, the game is a live service. Which means it has monetization outside of just buying the game. And any game that wants to sell itself for $60 up front and then also ask for more money afterwards always rubs me the wrong way. I do believe that since I played this on Xbox Games Pass on PC that it didn’t bother me as much as it could have though. I imagine if I did actually drop the $60 for it, it would’ve been a lot more upsetting. That being said, the monetization isn’t the worst. It’s actually fairly decent. There’s a battle pass that you can buy and then there’s shop only skins. Which at the moment that’s really it. The game does have an in-game currency but from what I can tell you can’t buy it with actual money, so there’s no power buy there. The game does also have loot boxes, but again there isn’t any way to buy them at the moment. I could see the game allowing for either to happen down the line. I hate to be skeptical about that when I love the game so much but that’s just the nature of a live service title. I will say the one monetization thing that does bother me is that you can buy the 3 locked classes with money, and it’s one of the first pop ups in the game. Upon launching the game I was immediately put off by that. But as I noted earlier, nothing ever really felt like a grind, unless you’re craving to play as these characters I got to them pretty quickly and always had the “BikCoin” (name of the in game currency) to buy it.
I’m also worried about the longevity of this game. Based on the steam charts and reviews, not a lot of people bought this. I assume the overwhelming amount of people that played this are playing off of games pass. Which makes sense because I very rarely saw someone with the Capcom ID logo by their name and not the Xbox symbol. And I never saw a Sony symbol. I’m not sure if that exists or if they are also just a Capcom symbol. But we all have seen the graveyard of live services over the last few years. Live service after live service going offline. I’m worried this game won’t get the traction it needs to survive being a live service. And part of the concern comes from my lack of desire to play it now that I’ve “finished” it. After I finished the story I admittedly haven’t played it much. I do still enjoy it but nothing is pulling me back to it now. And with a ton of other games in my library and on the horizon I’m worried this game will just slowly die out. Especially since someone who’s as enthusiastic about it as me has stopped playing it. We’ll see if Capcom keeps up with the support of the game. Would be sad to see them have a blemish on their recent record of bangers.
TLDR
Exoprimal is such a fun, insane, intense and goofy time. The story surprised me with how much I liked it. This game has a lot of fun to offer but I think the pitch of this for $60 for a live service game that already hasn’t gotten much traction is a tough sale. I think the game alone without the baggage of live service might be a tough sale at $60. But if you have Xbox games pass and some friends I 100% recommend you guys download this and play the fuck out of it because god damn it goes hard.
Also Casey Edwards of DMC5 fame did a song for it. And it’s a banger.
Exohuman by Casey Edwards
TLDR at the end
What is Exoprimal?
Exoprimal is an absolutely absurd and fantastic game. There’s so many different things going on at once that it’s not easily explained. It’s a co-op horde shooter akin to something like Left 4 Dead but you have hero shooter style characters where they all have different kits and abilities while also simultaneously being a PvP race to the finish against another team where the team can invade you or do various things to slow down your progress. Then at the end of the mission you either enter a specific PvEvP area where you and the enemy team duke it out trying to complete various objects alongside hoards of dinosaurs, a more intense PvE race to the finish or a 10 player co-op raid style missions with boss fights. And I fucking love every single piece of this game. This combines some of my favorite genres into one. I love co-op hoard shooters like L4D2, hero shooters like Overwatch and Battleborn (R.I.P. Battleborn) and I love weird PvEvP experiences like Destiny’s Gambit or Gigantic, although I didn’t play Destiny much, what I did play was focused around Gambit. I think the love stems from how much League of Legends I played when I was younger and I love seeing Moba mechanics or ideas added to other genres. Especially shooters!
Now I don’t think this game is for everyone. I think there’s elements of this game that everyone can enjoy, but I think the collective package is going to hit everyone differently. Which seems to be the sentiment among Steam reviews and actual reviews I’ve seen. But I come here today as a lover of weird PvEvP games such as Battleborn, Gigantic and Gambit. I come here with a love of horde shooters like Left 4 Dead 2, Vermintide, Deep Rock and more. I come here with a love of the Moba formula from my history of League of Legends and Heroes of the Storm. And this game is absolutely what I wanted and honestly more.
Gameplay
At its core the game is a 5v5 race to complete various objectives assigned to you in that match. There’s a pretty decent variety of objectives ranging from killing all the dinosaurs summoned, protecting specific zones, capturing points and more. What’s a little strange is that when you first start out playing you’re actually pretty limited to the various objectives you get in the matches. Objectives are locked behind story progression which is a cool idea in theory and does allow for things to get introduced at a nice pace, if it was paced out correctly. I’ll get into that more later though. Generally the objective race is finished with some sort of capstone objective which is likely fighting stronger dinosaurs or there’s special events like the Raptor Cascade. Where it gets very cinematic and thousands upon thousands of raptors are spawned in. There’s quite a few different ones like this but the Raptor Cascade is by far my favorite.
Raptor Cascade
Then after that you’re teleported to a PvP zone (or it can be extended PvE race) which is where I think this game really shines. That’s when things get the most chaotic. Depending on how much better you were doing than the enemy team you can get a pretty substantial head start in the PvP area. Much like the objectives during the race, there’s different ones you can get at the end like a payload escort, capture points, and more. But these are also locked behind story progression. And for the start of the game you primarily are getting data cube escorts. During the final event teams will get these things called Dominators, which allow you to invade and attack the enemy team as a dinosaur. What you get for invading depends on how far ahead or behind you are to the enemy team. Generally if you’re really behind you’ll get rewarded with a T. Rex, otherwise you could get a Triceratops or a Carnotaurus which seems to be the lowest tier of the invading dinosaurs. But I personally prefer the Carnotaurus over the Triceratops but I think it’s because the Triceratops is a little harder to use. The dominator is really fun and is a really cool comeback mechanic to the game which I think is needed, because otherwise it can be a total stomp if you have no way to slow down the enemy. There’s another comeback mechanic too! This one is called the Neo Trigger Saur. The game summons a gold dinosaur that you can kill, and then from there it grades you on how fast you’re killing dinosaurs and will cause an upgraded dinosaur threat to the enemy team. It’s a really cool mechanic in my eyes. Generally that’s how a match will play out. There’s some story missions that are really cool and will always play out the same, as in the same events but those events are so fucking badass. All of this together creates such a crazy chaotic blend of action that is so cool that I can’t help but to smile while playing this game. And the amount of dinosaurs you get swarmed with can be quite terrifying. Some matches spawn in a Stegosaurus, a T. Rex and a Carnotaurus along with the thousands of raptors getting spawned in and it can become extreme chaos. It’s also important to note that if you ever completely wipe in an event it will reset the event. But if just one person goes down you can either wait for the respawn timer or someone can pick you up.
Classes
In the game you have access to a total of 10 playable Exosuits (7 when you first start), which is what the game calls its different classes/characters you can play. These classes are separated by DPS, Tank and Support. Much like a hero shooter. There’s no role enforcement of any kind and there’s no restrictions to what one person can be in a match. Which is a blessing and a curse. I generally like having the freedom to create whatever composition I want with my teammates but at the same time it’s frustrating when the team is 3 tanks and 2 DPS with no healer. That happened occasionally and it was very frustrating, but for the most part a lot of people seemed to understand the general roles that were needed. What’s nice, is that if you go into a match with an Exofighter but you want to change to say a healer since you don’t have one, you can. You can change characters anytime during a match. You’ll exit your current suit and be just a person running around with a weak assault rifle. If you do it during the down time between objectives it is an instant change but if you do it while an objective is going you’ll have to wait for a cooldown. This is nice to be able to change on the fly and to any role and to be able to have duplicates of any role. Every Exosuit comes with its own set of abilities. I think universally every character has 1 movement ability while the others can vary from damage abilities, blocking abilities, crowd control and more. Every character also has an ult much like your standard hero shooter. What’s nice is if you swap between characters mid match though you actually retain your ult charge.
I personally found that all the Exosuits were really fun to play, some fit my playstyle more than others, but every role had at least 1 suit I loved. I won’t go over every single one but I just want to highlight some of my favorites. My personal favorites were Deadeye, Barrage, Krieger, and Skywave. Which I think my personal favorites being half the available roster is a testament to how fun the various classes are.
Customization and Progression
The fun doesn’t just end with the various exosuits. Every Exosuit has its own progression system where you level up and you can unlock modules for them. The modules range from general buffs like adding more base health, faster ult charge, some knockback resistance and more. While others are character specific and usually alter the way a character’s ability operates to some degree. Some are more impactful than others. There were definitely a few modules that I don’t even think I bothered looking at in my time playing. But the character progression system they have in place I think feels really good. I think in 90% of my matches my account level leveled up, whatever suit I was using their level went up and I was constantly getting something.
As some may already know, the game is a live service so it having all sorts of progression systems should be no surprise. And I will address concerns I have about that later but I think overall the game is very generous with its progression and nothing ever felt like a grind to me while playing. As a matter of fact I unlocked things pretty instantly when available.
Story
I think for me the most surprising thing about this game was the story. It’s by no means a great story that can stand next to the narrative giants of the industry. But it’s that capcom camp and dialed to 100. It’s such a good, stupid, schlocky science fiction story involving AI, Mechs, Multiple Dimensions, Time Travel, Dinosaurs, AI artificially created Dinosaurs, corporations being bad and greedy. Basically it’s got almost every single science fiction trope all wrapped up in one package and it just works. Plus the way they have the characters written and voiced they just crack me up and are all very personable. I actually burst out laughing a few times playing this game and watching the cutscenes. I won’t really spoil the details of the story past here since I unironically think it’s worthwhile to see for yourself. Primarily only if you like schlocky sci-fi action plots. It’s campolicious.
Issues and Concerns
While this review has mostly been glowing, I do have concerns about this game. As I’ve noted, the game is a live service. Which means it has monetization outside of just buying the game. And any game that wants to sell itself for $60 up front and then also ask for more money afterwards always rubs me the wrong way. I do believe that since I played this on Xbox Games Pass on PC that it didn’t bother me as much as it could have though. I imagine if I did actually drop the $60 for it, it would’ve been a lot more upsetting. That being said, the monetization isn’t the worst. It’s actually fairly decent. There’s a battle pass that you can buy and then there’s shop only skins. Which at the moment that’s really it. The game does have an in-game currency but from what I can tell you can’t buy it with actual money, so there’s no power buy there. The game does also have loot boxes, but again there isn’t any way to buy them at the moment. I could see the game allowing for either to happen down the line. I hate to be skeptical about that when I love the game so much but that’s just the nature of a live service title. I will say the one monetization thing that does bother me is that you can buy the 3 locked classes with money, and it’s one of the first pop ups in the game. Upon launching the game I was immediately put off by that. But as I noted earlier, nothing ever really felt like a grind, unless you’re craving to play as these characters I got to them pretty quickly and always had the “BikCoin” (name of the in game currency) to buy it.
I’m also worried about the longevity of this game. Based on the steam charts and reviews, not a lot of people bought this. I assume the overwhelming amount of people that played this are playing off of games pass. Which makes sense because I very rarely saw someone with the Capcom ID logo by their name and not the Xbox symbol. And I never saw a Sony symbol. I’m not sure if that exists or if they are also just a Capcom symbol. But we all have seen the graveyard of live services over the last few years. Live service after live service going offline. I’m worried this game won’t get the traction it needs to survive being a live service. And part of the concern comes from my lack of desire to play it now that I’ve “finished” it. After I finished the story I admittedly haven’t played it much. I do still enjoy it but nothing is pulling me back to it now. And with a ton of other games in my library and on the horizon I’m worried this game will just slowly die out. Especially since someone who’s as enthusiastic about it as me has stopped playing it. We’ll see if Capcom keeps up with the support of the game. Would be sad to see them have a blemish on their recent record of bangers.
TLDR
Exoprimal is such a fun, insane, intense and goofy time. The story surprised me with how much I liked it. This game has a lot of fun to offer but I think the pitch of this for $60 for a live service game that already hasn’t gotten much traction is a tough sale. I think the game alone without the baggage of live service might be a tough sale at $60. But if you have Xbox games pass and some friends I 100% recommend you guys download this and play the fuck out of it because god damn it goes hard.
Also Casey Edwards of DMC5 fame did a song for it. And it’s a banger.
Exohuman by Casey Edwards
What's with Square's recent obsession with AI upscaling? And here its looking more like one of these xbr shaders instead. I realize some people may prefer it like that and is fine to have options like that, but it's ridiculous to not have the option to play it with original graphics...
Other than that, its probably one of the best remasters square has made(not that it means much considering how mediocre these are in general), they actually added content that had been planned for the original ps1 release, but cut due to time constraints. And there are some legit great QoL improvements. It suffers a bit from having a very mobile-ish default interface, but pretty much everything can be disabled except the auto-save circle every new screen and the generic font, which can be a bit annoying.
Other than that, its probably one of the best remasters square has made(not that it means much considering how mediocre these are in general), they actually added content that had been planned for the original ps1 release, but cut due to time constraints. And there are some legit great QoL improvements. It suffers a bit from having a very mobile-ish default interface, but pretty much everything can be disabled except the auto-save circle every new screen and the generic font, which can be a bit annoying.
Octopath Travelver but good
(I have not played Octopath)
Will continue to update after each campaign
(I have not played Octopath)
Will continue to update after each campaign