We had the opportunity to try out a preview of Exoprimal from the Capcom booth in Tokyo Game Show 2022 and here are our thoughts on it so far.
Initially, I was rather skeptical about Exoprimal because of the track record with Capcom games usually having extremely well polished combat mechanics but at the trade of team-based shooters not having much of a deep mechanic to them. But my worries were set at ease as I played through the demo of Exoprimal.
From my time of playing, there were a ton of really interesting that I could do while playing Exoprimal. I mainly tried out the two exosuits: one being the Assault class suit – Barrage and the other one being the Tank class suit – Roadblock. Throw this out first but I absolutely love the designs for all the exosuits, especially with Barrage.
Like, look at this suit, it pretty much shares the same embodiment of how Ghost Rider looks with his skull-like helmet and having flames coming out on top of it. It also uses a crossbow as its main weapon and freaking grenades.
Going more into the gameplay mechanics of the game, the controls for the suits feels slightly different from your standard shooter games. One of the instance being that there’s no aim down sights, you practically have to hip fire while running around. Personally, I don’t think this is much of an issue for me since I mainly hip fire for most of my time playing Apex Legend so it’s pretty much second nature to me.
The weapons and playstyle for each of the exosuits feel pretty interesting too. Roadblock allows you to punch through your enemies and for Barrage, it has an arching grenade launcher so both suits requires you to play in a certain way that encourages practice which I think is a nice breath of fresh air from some of the other shooter titles out there.
With Roadblock, his main feature is his shield where people could make comparisons between him and Reinhardt from Overwatch where you pretty much walk around with your shield out while everyone else has fun but boom, I realised while playing him you can actually airblock. And also by hitting attack while blocking, you’re able to preform a Monster Hunter-like shield trust where if you get the timing right during certain animations, you’ll get to stagger the enemies.
With Barrage on the other hand, he’s got a skill where he is able to preform a jump and throw down 3 mines, which you can detonate them remotely and by it’s own that’s pretty good but when I was stumbling around with the controls trying to get myself familiarised by it, I accidentally detonated the mines which was below my feet. I fully expected to die in a Dragoon-like death but to my surprised, I performed a rocket jump instead.
One of the finale missions had us play in a co-op battle against a Neo T-Rex which striked a very similar resemblance to Shin Godzilla with growths all over its body. And after trying to get in the DPS where I only then noticed that the growths on its body were bursting, so now the game had became about opening up its weakpoints and saving your teammates from atomic destruction.
All in all, I had a wonderful time playing through the preview and I’m looking forward to the game’s official release in 2023.