From the latest generation of consoles Capcom live a sweet moment: it’s not complicated to consider her as the developer third party currently in the best of creative health. But it is also putting all your eggs in the basket of the best known intellectual properties: monster hunter, resident Evil, street fightercompilations of his classic titles With the mysterious pragmatic, exoprimal be the exception to this rule.
exoprimal it’s a hero shooter cooperative and competitive in the third person: a PvPvE. It is a very competitive market where any game that is not free (it’s not) is struggling to climb the first step to notoriety. Capcom’s proposal to arrive in 2023 for PC, PS5, Xbox Series, PS4 and Xbox One intends to achieve this in two ways: with a your crazy (here we are facing huge waves of dinosaurs) and promising that every game will be different (the objectives change and are rearranged each time we enter the matchmaking).
In Vandal, we were able to play for several hours at a closed beta on Steam with still quite limited content, but which has allowed us to be clear about the ideas that the title wants to establish, and to discover what it has to offer. the potential to surprise more than one when it opens next year.
Dinosaurs and evil artificial intelligences
The premise of the argument exorprimal It’s not entirely original, but it has a certain absurd touch, pulp and sarcasm which well managed can compensate for the above. In the year 2040, our avatar, which we personalize with a simple editor, joined the ranks of Aibius. The company is trying to end the waves of dinosaurs that put humanity in check through the use of exo-armours (similar to Anthem’s halberds) and with a artificial intelligence leviathanwhich predicts where new invasions will occur.
It doesn’t take long for Leviathan to go mad and plunges ex-soldiers into endlessly repeated aptitude tests with the goal of developing unbeatable combat techniques against the tides of hundreds of thousands of saurpsids that are devastating cities. It is interesting the method of narrating this plotthrough monlogos of the AI before entering the game and with changes, in addition to the use of cinematic scenes from time to time. In the beta, there wasn’t much of this content, so it remains to be seen how quickly the story moves, or if it will also be supported by events or seasons, as is customary in games. on line.
A crazy game that promises that each game will be unique
Moment to moment, exoprimal doesn’t seem too different from shooter cooperatives like World War Z there left for dead change the undead into dinosaurs and add a layer of hero shooterr where each of the five team players has a specific role. However, it adds several ideas to the standardized cooperative shooter proposition against hordes of enemies that sets it apart from the rest.
The objective of modo main, Marea Cretchica (the only one available during the test), is achieve the objectives proposed by Leviathan before the opposing team; in the last phase, the two teams face each other directly, which makes it possible to reverse the roles. The particularity of this mode is that with each game the events and/or their order change.
At the start of the game, Leviathan sends all players onto the battlefield: during the technical test, there was only one map, a desolate, half-ruined futuristic city. The AI, with behavior similar to the director of the shooter Valve zombies we will guide around the scene through different tests: Kill a number of dinosaurs in an area as quickly as possible, resist a huge comic wave by strategically placing walls, defeat huge creatures like Triceratops These are events perceived as amusing, even if it is true that we perceive the expected repeatability of this game type after a handful of games.
The team that manages to complete the various objectives the fastest enters the final phase. In most of our games it was a PvPvE test where the team had to collect 100 tokens around the stage before the others. opponents, who only in this phase can be fought directly; each kill grants a juicy amount of tokens. Thus, the cards, if the only one present is exemplary of the rest, not only must they be properly designed for dinosaur waves and different tests, but also for PvP taking into account the abilities of each of the exo-armours.
However, not all games ended like this, as in some the end point was set by a confrontation with a huge chief where the ten players must cooperate. Although the battle we saw in the test was spectacular due to its scale, in terms of gameplay it was not so much because it repeated mechanics that we have seen a thousand times: laser beams to jump , tail swipes to dodge We don’t ask for a game like this for high enemy AI, but I know we would have liked the attack patterns bosses were more original, and that there was more variety in standard dinosaurs (there are faster, bigger, explosive and flying ones). But again, this is a test with limited content.
team action
In Exoprimal, players don the exo armor, each with their own abilities and with obvious synergies between them, which effectively qualifies Capcom’s title as a hero shooter. Judging by the menu, in the launch there will be more than a dozen, but during the test, we were able to test four of them: two from the assault role, one from tank and one from support. Each of them has, in addition to the main attack, several skills that recharge over time.
Thus, there are exo-armours centered on the healing one of the allies who can also deal damage to enemies when needed, another who looks like a Reinhardt’s adaptation of Surveillanceand a very differently damage-focused couple: one of them is your character of shooter usual third person, able to fire grenades that launch dozens of dinosaurs into the air and with quick dodges; another turns the game into a hack and slashwith very movement-oriented skills and a satisfying sword swing that launches the opponent into the air to leave them at our mercy.
As you can see, they are not very original, but they require a certain mastery of their movements and powers, because everyone has their time to get used to it. Moreover, it is clear that some are more manageable when playing with strangers and others more viable when playing with co-workers With the mic: It’s quite risky to rush in to slash if a teammate isn’t covering you, and even riskier to stop to revive or heal a teammate if the tank isn’t paying attention to you. The system key is at any time you can change between one armor or anotherwithout needing to reappear, to adapt to the rhythm of the game and the objective that we have in hand at that moment.
To the skills of each class must be added the dominator, which has only appeared a few times in our games. It’s an item that replaces our ultimate ability with a single-use tool to directly control a big dinosaur, which has its own abilities. It’s not easy to pick up and requires mastering the timing of its animations, but it’s extremely satisfying Defeat other players and small dinosaurs with bites, tail swipes and lunges.
The Jurassic Sea
Capcom is once again betting on using the RE engine created with Resident Evil 7 and suitable for very different genres, as we have seen with Rise of the Monster Hunter there Street Fighter 6. Although exoprimal that’s not where it looks the bests shows the versatility of the engine, capable of displaying hundreds of dinosaurs without loss of performance. It is true that these are not creatures with such realistic movements as in monster hunter nor are there any characters as detailed as in The devil may cry 5but there are very colorful effects, the lighting It’s very detailed and spectacular modeling, especially the big monsters and armor.
In artistic, however, it has a certain generic air which removes personality from a proposal that would benefit from it. Music or sound effects of dinosaurs, weapons, etc. don’t come out either. Yes, we were surprised that the leave the PCEven though there are still months until the release, enjoy so many configuration options and features: frame rate unlimited, AMD FSR, support for ultra-wide displaysand very good performance (above 60 FPS in ultra and 1440p) with an Nvidia RTX 3070 8 GB card and an AMD Ryzen 5600X.
The doubt that remains exoprimal is whether your cooperative and competitive proposal will have the enough variety to last for hundreds of games, but we saw some good ideas in game mechanics and class design. That the objectives and their order change with each game is key for us, and the crazy tone of the gameplay and plot has a lot of potential. We’ve barely played a bit of what Capcom’s PvPvE will eventually be, but so far has caught our attention more than the trailer it premiered with in March.
We made these impressions thanks to a Steam key offered by Koch Media.