I didn't have high hopes for Exoprimal, honestly. It seemed like some sort of generic Overwatch wannabe from early trailers, and there was very little buzz around it, launching to zero fanfare. But hey, I figured, I have Game Pass, I'll try it.

Those motherfuckers at Capcom don't miss.

The basic premise is that you're an exosuit pilot who's tossed back in time and across dimensions by an evil AI in order to gather combat data. He acts as the "DM" for your missions, spawning in dinosaurs and determining objectives. There are two teams of 5 players doing this simultaneously, and you're racing to finish all of your objectives first. These can be simply killing a certain number of certain types of dinosaurs, holding an area, defending a VTOL craft, etc.

After all of your main objectives are done, you enter the final mission. There are two types of these: PVE and PVP. In PVE, you're just racing again like in the first segment. I don't like these because if you fall behind there's nothing you can really do to catch up. If you finish within 20 seconds of the enemy team, it counts as a victory for both, though. Everybody wins! But not really. You know you lost.

PVP finales have more variety. The best, and most common, mode is one where you're escorting a glowing cube to an end point, sort of a Payload thing where both sides have their own object to push. The enemy cube can also be destroyed, and players need to stand near it to repair it before it can resume down the path. It's an interesting risk-reward system as you decide if you want to stick with your own cube, or go try to kill some of the enemies or damage their cube.

There's another finale where you run around collecting batteries, which is the worst one, as it's not really even worth engaging with the other team's players. You're better off focusing solely on grabbing the batteries.

The third finale involves one player grabbing a hammer, the team killing dinos to charge it up, and then using the hammer to break through barriers until both teams eventually meet in the middle. This is a cool mode but it can be infuriating if you're stuck with a teammate who does not know what to do, and doesn't know how to drop the hammer. I can't entirely blame them, as it's a bit unintuitive (to break the barrier you use the interact prompt, not the "smash hammer" ability) but boy it made it mad a couple of times.

Anyway, I thought it was important to mention all of these mission types, because of the one big issue I have with this game. And it's a huge problem, one that will no doubt cause most players to simply quit playing before they even see most of them.

See... Mission types, and the new dinosaurs that come with them, are gated by story progress. Story missions are inserted when matchmaking at certain points, I believe based on player level. It doesn't tell you that you're going into one, and it's really cool when it happens. The integration of story elements into an otherwise regular multiplayer game is an interesting idea, and probably the sort of thing the developers of Blizzard should have done with Overwatch 2, if they weren't busy doing sex crimes or whatever the hell they're up to. But this means that for the first few hours or so you're going to see repeating missions/maps. I don't know why they decided it should take that long before you hit your first milestone, but... They did. After that, you'll be seeing story missions and new content at a pretty regular pace.

These later story missions are worth seeing, too. Some of them are simply absurd, with literal tidal waves of raptors coming at you, or bosses that function like large-scale MMO raids. The one downside is that there's no "vote to skip cutscene" functionality, as you can get these missions at any point after you've finished them, and the introductions can be a bit long-winded.

After finishing the story, I was informed that I can play a horde mode. That's cool, because the parts like that were my favorite bits of the game! Anyway, it's not in there yet. Owned. I guess they want to give everyone time to finish the story, because at the time of this writing, it's only 8 days away.

One last note: the in-game monetization is almost zero. There’s a battle pass, full of skins that look like shit. Everything else can be bought with coins or found in chests you get from leveling up.

The RNG also seems very generous because I already have most legendary skins. I was getting legendaries in about 1/3 of the chests I got, and coins are not in short supply.

If you have game pass, check Exoprimal out! Put some podcasts on and get through that initial grind, and you'll likely have a really good time. If you're on Playstation, uhhh... I'm not sure about spending 60 bux on this. But if it hits 40 and players are still around, I'd say that's worth it. I hope it does stick around and get some significant updates. Or maybe it'll be like Rumbleverse and get shut down in 4 months. RIP...

UPDATE 8/1/2023: the Savage Gauntlet mode added is NOT a horde mode, but essentially an extra-difficult version of one of the regular missions, without the whole enemy team element. Why this game about mowing down hordes of dinosaurs does not have a HORDE MODE is completely baffling to me, but I guess this means I'm done with it for a while. Thanks for the good times, Exoprimal, I wish you the best of luck! You're gonna need it.