Exoprimal review: an ode to Team Fortress 2 whose twist comes too late

ExoprimalMakes a bad first impression.

The game’s opening is a mix of breaking news and corporate recruitment. It manages to be absurd, but also refreshingly unserious, in its near-future setting. Let me explain: Rifts within the fabric of time have caused hordes to invade the Earth. To repel them, exosuits are needed. Also, an artificial intelligence named Leviathan is required to monitor and train the fighters.

Ace is a rookie mute who becomes a member of a patrol team that ends up in an alternate time line where a Leviathan rogue forces exosuits into endless wargames disguised as combat test. Said 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 you need to speed up or take it easy.

The magic begins when you complete your missions. Both teams suddenly find themselves on the same level as they face a last assignment. Now you can directly interfere with your enemy’s payload by blowing it up or performing a stealthy gank. Oh, and if you pick up one of the randomly spawning “Dominator” power-ups, you can transform into a TriceratopsTeleport to enemy territory and unleash a scaly devastation.

Capcom Image via Polygon

Sadly, the opening hours of this slow-moving store were not very successful. Exoprimal makes it frighteningly easy to write it off as another live-service hero shooter lurking in Overwatch’s shadow. There are 10 different exosuits that you can switch between, including a tank with a shield, rollerblading support and katanas. Their biomechanical designs and fleshy, plastic sofa innards are lovely to look at, but the door is left wide open for snide comparisons, and I felt inclined to make them — until I fell in love with my main.

The Barrage blend is an intense mix of Team Fortress 2.’s Demoman and Overwatch’s Junkrat. The clunk of his explosives is satisfying, and he has an additional stun grenade to swarm raptors. Exoprimal’s mechanics are tight and well up to Capcom’s high standards — stringing together these button presses is a satisfying kinetic process that allows you to enter a flow state of mayhem. In Barrage’s case, this ends with his ultimate, where you can turn into a gigantic missile and wipe out an entire five-stack of human players.

I quickly understood the mission despite briefly moonlighting in a faraway sniper position. Exoprimal is at its best when your team isn’t doubling up on suits, allowing for maximum synergy. Launching grenades at the horde and watching Skywave’s gravity well draw the dinosaurs together as Roadblock unleashes a tornado of doom is so satisfying, and it opens up opportunities for melee characters like Zephyr to swoop in and pummel the raptors as they whip around in sequence like they’re stuck in a cosmic washing machine.

Capcom Image via Polygon

However, given that each suit has its own proprietary progression system, there is little incentive to switch once you’ve found your favorite, which is firstly a major shame given the effort that has gone into crafting the 10-strong roster’s builds, but it also creates inevitable team composition issues once a meta hardens around Exoprimal. It would have been hard to stop being a life-long Barrager but I’d have rather not have the ability to double suit up within a group to maximize potential tactical creativity.

Regardless, I gradually learned how I could complement my squad’s abilities as I climbed through the proficiency 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 breed of hero shooter, one in which it’s far more about efficiency and communication than being “cracked.”

You can also read the review of food critics in Ratatouille, I was brought back to a halcyon time when esports ability wasn’t so coveted, and it was more about having fun pushing a payload with your friends on Gold Rush or fighting through the mall mobs in Dead Center. However, these feelings will soon fade as ExoprimalCan be its own worse enemy. Between matches, you’ll suffer through the mockumentary dialogue of a ship crew that feels like a watered-down Guardians of the Galaxy, begrudgingly clicking through a branching “analysis map” of mysteries, watching the tracker tick toward your next reward — a jargon-filled cutscene. The loop can grate in the early game, as, for several hours, there’s a distinct lack of mission variety and only a handful of maps… until something genuinely disarming happens.

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

Capcom Image via Polygon

After around a dozen 30-minute matches of Dino Survival, you’ll begin matchmaking into what appears to be a standard multiplayer game, only to find that one of your Aussie NPC comrades has invaded it, joining your squad to collect some data (and to call Leviathan “fucked in the head”). This shared-world storytelling event enrages the rogue AI, who starts tearing at the seams of the wargame’s rules, all while you’re still racing to beat the enemy team as usual. There are also mutated dinosaurs, swarms pterodactyls, and more challenging mission objectives like charging up the hammer or defending an VTOL.

The paradigm has shifted. ExoprimalIt has been improved in many ways, including the addition of new maps and a robust difficulty increase, as well as raid bosses. Finally, there is some narrative intrigue. It is a profoundly confusing pacing decision where you’re abruptly playing a very different, arguably much better game several hours in, one that actually 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 just wish it would have come much sooner, or was at least communicated better in the game’s marketing, as many players might not gain access to Exoprimal’s best assets before bouncing off of its boring early hours.

A seasonal live-service roadmap promises a time-based endgame mode, variant exosuits, and a Monster Hunter collaboration in the near future, which, as a player now caught in the game’s talons, is an exciting prospect. ExoprimalIt’s rough, but by the time the updates are released, the story will be able to find the nostalgia-driven audience it so desperately deserves.

Exoprimal Released on 14 July on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. Xbox One and Xbox Series X were also available. Capcom gave a PS5 download code to review the game. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.