I was a big fan of dinosaurs as a kid; I bought so many dinosaur figures together that I lost count. A good chunk of my childhood was spent smashing my action figures together like Dave Filoni writing a script. There might not be a better way to get kids, or even adults, automatically interested in something than by including dinosaurs; the mere presence of giant lizard behemoths instantly takes something that might be mundane and turns it into something truly exciting. Special props then to Capcom for doing the impossible: making dinosaurs boring. And it turns out all you needed to do was put them in a competitive multiplayer shooter.

Which brings us to Exoprimal. Capcom doesn’t do competitive multiplayer very often outside of the fighting game scene, and when it does happen, it’s usually yet another desperate attempt to make a Resident Evil multiplayer shooter. This time around, though, we’re squadding up and setting out to take down some dinos. This makes it seem like a coop shooter, but don’t let that initial impression fool you; Exoprimal is competitive through and through. Any time you enter a game, you’re competing against another team to see which can kill dinosaurs faster. Teams progress through a series of five waves with increasingly harder dinosaurs, before one final section which varies a bit in its nature. 

Exoprimal very heavily leans into the Aliens: Fireteam Elite gambit, which is to say launching with nowhere near enough content to justify the price tag, and hoping that players will stick around long enough for that content to get added in later on. It really feels like a game that was made to placate the trend-chasing executives that wanted microtransactions in Devil May Cry and Resident Evil - it's a live service multiplayer shooter with a season pass, a paid season pass, and (if all those chances to spend money didn’t quite do it for you) extra paid skins and cosmetics completely separate from the paid pass.

Once you fight through the wave of notifications for different battle passes and purchasable items like a hiker slicing his way through the thick overbrush, you can finally start playing the main campaign, which reminded me a bit of the original Titanfall in that you basically just get told the story while engaging in some wholly unrelated multiplayer shenanigans. The plot revolves around a rogue AI capturing various individuals from different points in time with powersuits and making them compete against each other, with the stated intention of eventually building the ultimate powersuit from the gathered data. The winners get to stay alive while the losers are brutally executed by way of dinosaur. It’s an interesting premise in theory, although since this is a multiplayer title and half the players in any given session are guaranteed to lose, the game just has to awkwardly pretend that you didn’t actually die when you lose, despite depicting your character getting torn to pieces at the end of each battle when you suffer defeat.

The story itself is pretty barebone and rarely actually involves you in a tangible way. After completing enough games you’ll get a cut scene featuring a bunch of characters with ridiculous comedic dialects from across the globe trying to figure out how to escape from the perpetual wargames. The story usually leans towards wacky quirkiness over serious drama, which is unfortunate as comedy requires a lighter touch, and between the ludicrous accents and the hit or miss jokes, it usually just falls flat. Not terrible, but flat; think of it as the narrative equivalent of 20 day old grape soda left at room temperature.

But who cares about the story in a multiplayer shooter, right? We’re here to kill some dinosaurs! And dinosaur killing within wargames is pretty fun, at first. The guns are reasonably punchy and tearing through waves of velociraptors, pterodactyls, and then a few bigger dinosaurs at the end is pretty fun. Learning how to do it quickly is engrossing too. Each mech suit has different strengths and weaknesses, making team composition important if you want to avoid getting mulched. After you fight through five waves of dinosaurs, you get thrown into either a PvP or (competitive) PvE ring, with a headstart on your opponent based on how far ahead or behind you were over those initial five waves. 

I’ll admit, there’s fun to be had tactically using a special move to wipe out a ton of dinosaurs at once. Since you're in a race against another team, most of the strategy in the initial segments comes down to optimizing killing dinosaurs quickly.  Learning how to exploit spawn points and how to position yourself to wipe out a group quickly is interesting enough, even if I wish there was a bit more depth to it. The ending segments are unfortunately often a lot less fun, especially the PvP elements, which are frankly downright awful and show how badly balanced Exoprimal is in some areas, but on the whole it remained a mostly tolerable experience for a couple of hours.

I played wargame mode until the routine of killing five waves then doing a PvP/PvE scramble started to get repetitive, then I decided to check out the other modes. I scrolled over to the list and thought “...wait a minute, there’s nothing else here. This can’t be all, can it?” Yes, even after completing the “story,” as it were, there was nothing else available at launch. One single game mode for 60 dollars. I’ve chided games in the past like Halo Infinite and the aforementioned Aliens: Fireteam Elite for launching without enough variety of game types, but those titles were bursting with variety compared to Exoprimal at launch.

Being the incredibly generous and courteous soul that I am, I decided to put my review on hold. I waited for seven days after finishing the main campaign to allow for the launch of the second main game mode, Savage Gauntlet. After all, Exoprimal certainly needs more variety in its content, and an extra mode seemed like just the trick. And you know what? It’s pretty fun; in fact, I’d argue much better than the standard Wargame. It feels like a proper survival mode with no crowbarred-in PvP elements. There’s a good bit more dinosaur variety too, or at least, it seems that way compared to the standard Wargame mode.

I had enough fun that I thought it might be worth getting a friend who had dropped the game earlier to try it. I invited him to give it a shot with me, so that we could kill some dinos co-op style. He booted Exoprimal up… only to find out that this mode doesn’t unlock until you beat the main “story,” or in other words, play about 15 hours' worth of Wargame matches.

This is one of the most baffling decisions I can imagine a developer making. In theory, a post-game mode designed to really challenge players with high level gear and unlocks is a good thing. But it should not be the priority when there's only one other mode to play, and even less so when that mode is pretty repetitive, and especially when you have to play close to 60 15 minute matches in order to even get to the post-game. I'm not sure how Capcom figured that a single mode could carry an entire multiplayer experience at launch - and be the sole way of experiencing the game for the first 15 hours post-update - but I can only assume it was a decision made by the same executive who keeps demanding multiplayer Resident Evil games.

Exoprimal is, as it stands, a dreadfully unfinished experience that I couldn't realistically recommend to anyone, at least not for the full new game price tag. There’s some fun to be had, but nowhere near enough variety or content to justify the price tag, and the fact the new mode that should address this is locked behind playing Wargame for enough time to finish a standard AAA game feels like a sick practical joke. I’m getting pretty tired of companies taking the approach of “give us $60 now, we’ll add enough content to justify it later.” Imagine if the next Monster Hunter launched and you had to repeat the same four or five hunts for 15 full hours before you were allowed to face off against anything new. That’s basically the Exoprimal experience.

And it’s not just me coming to this conclusion, either. The playerbase has already started to dwindle, with less than 2,000 concurrent players being its peak for the most recent week. By comparison, the aforementioned Fireteam Elite had more than four times that playerbase a month after launch, and it was virtually a ghost town a month after as well. You can see the same fate starting to creep up on Exoprimal; bots are already becoming more frequent occurrences in the games I've played recently, and with a ten player per match requirement (as opposed to Fireteam Elite’s three players), that’s only going to exacerbate the situation. Exoprimal will, most likely, be effectively dead by winter. So I can’t even recommend waiting for Capcom to add the content necessary to make it worth picking up; it’ll probably be very dead by the time that happens. 

It’s difficult to overstate just how disappointing Exoprimal is. I suppose the only group of people I can plausibly recommend this to are those on GamePass, and if this review has made you realize how badly you need this game in your life, then feel free to give it a shot and probably put it down immediately afterwards. For anyone else, there are infinitely better ways to spend $60. Here are a few ideas: 12 copies of Chop Goblins for yourself and 11 friends, a good new pair of dress shoes, two large bottles of Grey Goose to help you forget that Exoprimal exists, one very large chocolate bunny, one-tenth of a ride in an American ambulance, or maybe even a collection of dinosaur action figures, which you can smash together and have more fun with than you would playing Exoprimal.

You will probably like Exoprimal if: I genuinely cannot think of a group that I confidently think would enjoy this game.

You might like Exoprimal if: You have an exceptionally high tolerance for repetition. If you work in data entry, and you like media with dinosaurs in it, this might be for you?

You will probably not like Exoprimal if: The prospect of having a second job you have to pay for is not appealing to you.