Over the past 20 years, video game developers have treated us to many cautionary AI stories with which to prise apart and comprehend today’s burgeoning ChatGPTapocalypse. There’s ECHO, with its baroque maze of surveillance chambers that spawn clones based on the player’s activities. There’s Observation, in which you are the AI – an eerie and thoughtful portrayal of a space station computer trying to figure itself out, while saving a human crew from abduction. And now there’s Exoprimal, in which AI is a huge, glowing dude called Leviathan who upends big, steaming mugs of dinosaurs over maps and yells at you to massacre them so it can guzzle up your combat data and craft a better mech suit.
It’s the algorithm-jinxed End of History you haven’t been waiting for: ancient and futuristic pop signifiers biting and blasting each other over a single, endlessly repeating day on a tropical Bond villain-style island base, which exists outside the matches as a sort of “information pizza” of unlockable backstory documents, featuring words like “vortexer” and Much Ado about rogue timelines. It’s also quite a decent shooter, offering up some fun mech classes and blending PvP with PvE in an engrossing way, though probably not worth the £55 it’s currently asking on Steam. Gamepassers, rejoice! Here’s another solid B-lister for your collection.
The trick to both enjoying and mastering Exoprimal is realising that it’s not a fight, but a race. Each match sees teams of five players running from waypoint to waypoint, completing small objectives that consist initially of wave defence battles against the dinos, who are conjured from floating blobs of purple energy. The game’s 10 mech suits, aka exosuits, come in DPS, healer and tank categories familiar from countless other hero shooters, notably Overwatch. There’s Roadblock, who can throw up a shield for others to cower behind, Vigilant, who’s got a hybrid sniper rifle you can charge up in scoped view or rapid-fire from the hip, and Skywave, a staff-wielding medic who can glide. Each exosuit has a couple of special abilities, a slowly ripening ultimate that, say, freezes time within an area or calls in artillery, a generic item such as a health kit, and slots for three stat modifiers.
