I’m no stranger to content with mech suits or power armour. I’m not going to bog this down with a debate over what the difference is, you should all know by now. Samus Aran: Power armour. Armaro Ray: mech suit. Anyway, my itch for a bit of exosuit (that’s right, I added a third one, come at me) gameplay has been gently scratched this week with the release of Capcom’s Exoprimal. If you’re not in the know, Exoprimal is a multiplayer third-person shooter with a unique selling point that your main enemy is an endless wave of dinosaurs.

Dropped into a dystopian world riddled with dinosaurs and seemingly controlled by a shady AI called Leviathan. Leviathan sets objectives such as killing a certain number of dinosaurs or defending an area, all while another team of exosuited troopers are doing the same thing; aiming to be the first team to do what the enigmatic AI asks. You create yourself a stock character to pilot your exosuit and join a group made up of a broad range of stereotypes and caricatures to fill up your ship. None of them are particularly memorable or noteworthy besides perhaps Majesty, a fiery female exopilot who’s personality is being angry and rude, whose greatest asset is looking somewhat like Regina from Dino Crisis. That’ll be the one link to Dino Crisis I’ll be making in this review since if I think about it more I’ll get violently angry that Capcom made this rather than a remake of that classic…

The game handles very very well as controlling the exosuits comes with a certain weight. Each of the 10 available exosuits is a very different beast with totally varied skills, movement and weapons. Having tested all of them I can say with some certainty that the bog standard “Deadeye” suit is my favourite, an assault rifle wielding Jack of all trades. The Deadeye is also what I like to call the most Gundam of all the suits, nothing but ordinance to lay waste to the dino hordes!

Speaking of the dinosaurs, they really do come at you. Leviathan will summon the prehistoric beasties from portals each round and send them sprinting in your general direction. The bulk of their force is in the form of Raptors, but now and then you’ll be faced with Pterodactyls, Triceratops, headbutt dinosaurs (I don’t know their name and can’t look them up) all the way up to a Tyrannosaurus as an occasional end level boss! A few levels in you’ll also encounter juiced up “Neosaurs” who will rip you asunder in seconds if you don’t have a good team at your back. While the dinosaurs themselves are fun to fight on the most part, the bosses like the triceratops or T-Rex do sometimes feel more like bullet sponges than a true challenge. As for their spawn rates, it gets immensely frustrating how often you’ll hear “spawning Raptors, spawning Raptors, spawning Pterosaurs”. For gods sake Leviathan, shut the hell up!!!

Repetition is actually the single biggest flaw of the game. The gameplay varies very slightly each match and after two or three you’ll start to notice the similarities. There is some story to try and keep things interesting, interspersed between every few games, and there are cutscenes to push the story along. Every match is a chance to unlock the video game standard audio logs that try to piece together a few more of the facts as to why Leviathan is going rogue. My thoughts, he was asked to make one too many artworks of Mr. Incredible as a merman.

At the end of it all, Exoprimal is a very fun game so long as you play it in short bursts. You’ll never be settling into a overnight slog with this one, maybe in time with a few DLC releases to bring new maps, and certainly the upcoming collaboration with Street Fighter 6 bringing a Ryu Exosuit. Until then though, this is a good bit of fun to have for an hour or so but nothing to really celebrate just yet. I’m giving Exoprimal

6 / 10

Written by Will.

Edited by Alexx.