Exoprimal is a childhood dream game made real. It’s the figurative mashing together of plastic power armor against mouth breathing dinosaur models whose joints lack proper flexibility. The very premise is ripped right out of B-movie havens such as The Asylum, distributor of the intentionally bad Sharknado, but executed with a decently budgeted spit-shine polish that can only come out of a video game studio like Capcom. The network test’s introductory news reels and exposition indicate that the developers are self-aware enough regarding their silly, stupid, and ridiculous premise, but they execute upon it with a straight face.

It’s that Venn Diagram of dumb and cool, where a concept is so bizarre or implausible yet captures our very fantasies like no other. The sight of raptors literally raining from the sky, smashing and splashing onto the hard ground only to stand back up and charge forward in a flood of gnashing teeth and slashing claws, is simultaneously funny and yet wonderful. Despite the impossibility of a Tyrannosaurus Rex leaping into the air and performing a flying kick, the very animation and depiction activates just the right neurons in the brain to generate excitement. The logical parts of our brain clash with our most primal or childish, and in the end, it’s that youthful exuberance that wins out. Reject reality and accept the fantasy of robots fighting dinosaurs as the jovial dream that it is.

Despite this overwhelming sense of joy that the test delivered, there are still plenty of question marks left hanging over one’s head. Just how diverse will the final game modes be on release? Prior trailers, interviews, and marketing materials insinuated that there will be a story mode that follows some uniquely designed characters, but how exactly will they pull it off? Will it be a lengthy tutorial for the multiplayer disguised as a single-player campaign, or will it be a unique experience all its own? Does every game mode have a competitive element to it? What sort of monetization can players come to expect? Does Capcom plan on providing regular content updates to keep the community coming back?

There’s no doubt that Exoprimal made for a fantastic two hours of gameplay, but does it stand a chance of lasting for two-hundred hours?

From a perspective of pure polish, the answer is yes. Though I’ve grown to have great faith in Capcom, I was worried that the silliness of Exoprimal’s concept would have led to a smaller or lesser team being assigned to develop it. The game is visually stunning, but I was also concerned that it would feel janky, clunky, or outright awkward. Instead, I was immediately satisfied with how smooth the movement felt and how snappy button input response was. This is definitely Capcom at their finest, making sure that the player is able to act and react in a fast-paced game without having to think about the controller in their hand. It becomes an extension of the self: latency between the human brain, the thumbs and fingers gripping the controller, and the game have been kept to an imperceptible minimum.

I admittedly wasn’t expecting it to feel so good with at least half a year remaining to work on the game, but it’s clear the development team has gotten the core experience to a more-than-satisfactory level. That, no doubt, is one of the reasons for the Network Test: to get the game into the hands of more players and see whether the net code itself is up to that same standard. I, personally, did not run into any network connection issues, nor did I perceive much in the way of lag. I have a pretty decent cable Internet with a medium-to-high range computer, and I was streaming at the same time, yet I did not notice any obvious discrepancies regarding ping, delayed response, and so on.

In fact, for a Closed Network Test, it felt surprisingly “finished” in most respects. The greatest indication that the game was incomplete were the occasional dips in frame rate and audio drops, occurring seemingly at random and mostly in the earlier stages of gameplay. There was also the occasional glitch, such as not being able to apply my character’s desired beard or the pack of raptors that failed to die or despawn in my final match. My anonymous companions and I had tried to attack or kill them, but they suffered no damage. Just the same, they did none to us. We simply moved on to our next objective, the vicious dinosaurs hounding our every step until we were warped into the final phase of the match.

Which is where my real concern is. Given how rarely I ran into problems with performance or network connection, I’m more than confident they’ll have the technical aspects of this game polished to a sparkling shine by its 2023 release. The question is just how many more game modes do they plan on including, and do they all conclude with a head-to-head confrontation with the other team?

I was disheartened to learn during the game’s announcement that its primary game mode would focus on teams of players competing against one another. While so many players celebrated Gambit as this wonderful new mode when it premiered in Destiny 2, I had simply longed for a new Horde mode to take the place of the original Destiny’s Prison of Elders. I didn’t want to compete with real players, especially if they could invade my arena and disrupt potential in-the-zone moments. While there was certainly joy to be found in seeing who could summon their Primeval first, a “meta” would swiftly appear that allowed teams in-the-know to quickly pile on the motes of light, keep the opposite team at a minimum, and summon their boss-level monstrosity before their opponent was even halfway towards their own goal.

Exoprimal is more appealing than Gambit for certain, in part because it has an actual variety of objectives and scenarios. While most of the players’ time will be spent mowing down different raptors and specialty dinosaurs, they’ll occasionally have to defend an objective from taking damage, defeat a rather large T-Rex, Triceratops, or Ankylosaurus, collect energy resources scattered throughout the environment, or guide a payload towards a goal. This prevents each match from feeling exactly the same, though there’s a clear formula each round follows: race to see who can get to the final challenge first, and then confront the enemy team head on. I even began to notice that the losing team will be granted a “Dominator” – one of the larger dinosaurs controlled by a lone player – before the winning team, giving them the possibility to catch up to their opponent and turn the tide.

While this game mode is certainly an improvement over Gambit, and being able to watch silhouettes of the opposing team combat dinosaurs or sprint on ahead gives a sense of urgency or progress to the proceedings, it runs the risk of growing stale or isolating certain players. By the end of my two hour session I was getting sick of having to worry about another team. Regardless of how well you can tackle the dinosaurs, the real deciding factor was whether you could outgun your opposing team. Once players discover “the meta”, it will become an even less satisfying conclusion to an otherwise crazy fun session of blasting dinosaurs back to the Cretaceous. At some point, players will begin wondering why they’re even bothering with PvE if the deciding factor of a match comes down to PvP instead.

I do believe the developers have tried to implement a lot of small details and adjustments to help the teams remain neck-and-neck rather than allowing one side to completely dominate the other. The aforementioned gift of a Dominator to the losing team is just one example. However, one of my favorite modes was to simply join up with nine other players to tackle an outrageously difficult mutation of a T-Rex, complete with Godzilla style death breath and Dark Soulsian pustules of glowing purple. It felt more like a Raid boss in an MMO, and it had me curious what other sorts of transformations were available for other dinosaurs. Unfortunately, it was the only match of the sort I had run into while playing, and the only break I had from direct competition with other players.

If Exoprimal wants to succeed, then I definitely believe they need modes that eliminate the direct competition aspect. This doesn’t mean they’d always have to remove the race with another team, though doing so could open up more possibilities of mode types. Just one team, the enemy dinosaurs, and the need to survive. Perhaps allow the players to crank the difficulty up so they have to tackle multiple giant dinosaurs at once, or have to focus on other objectives than merely mowing down dinosaurs. The point is, there will be players that want to drive the murderous stampede of raptors back into extinction without the pressure of having to also perform against human opponents.

Variety is the space of life, they say, and while it seems to me that Exoprimal aims to have a lot of variety within its base game mode, I hope to see them keep players less inclined towards PvP in their thoughts. Similarly, I think there should be a game mode that is strictly PvP, as I think the variety of suits works well for some old-fashioned throwdowns.

Naturally, I have no clue how many more modes Capcom are developing or planning for the game. It could be that alternate modes without PvP are already in the works, or that the story campaign will allow for co-op against the A.I. without worrying about an opposing team. On that note, there’s a whole host of suits that were not available in the Network Test, each which could have addressed some of my other concerns. For example, Roadblock was the only Tank unit in the test, and while he was fine for the majority of situations, he was not the greatest PvP unit nor did he seem to stand much of a chance against certain larger dinosaurs. Even though the game allows players to hot-swap which class they’re playing as, it would be nice to play a Tank unit whose primary mode of defense can perhaps last longer against a powerful lone dinosaur rather than shattering like glass when trying to defend the rest of the team.

Other suits will no doubt fill a greater variety of situational roles, but there’s far less indication that the situations themselves will be more varied than what we’ve played. Admittedly, having taken Capcom’s post-game survey, I can certainly say that they seem to be checking with their testers as to what other types of game modes they would like to see. This could also explain why the release date is a vague 2023 despite the actual mechanics feeling solid; they need time to figure out what additional sorts of match types to invest in based on player feedback.

Regardless, I look forward to playing in the next two network tests as well. I’m afraid the longevity of this lone game mode will also be tested in this time, but I have a feeling Capcom knows they have something here and want to make sure they don’t screw it up. Additionally, while I may harbor doubts at the longevity of the current solitary game mode, I can confess to desiring to play more Exoprimal the day after. Capcom is onto something with this game, and I hope they manage to knock it out of the park with the final product.