Exoprimal: a technically competent revival of the dinosaur action genre, tested on PS5 and Series X/S
A few key changes could make the game substantially better on current-gen hardware.
Dinosaur-based action titles used to dominate the gaming industry. Turok and Dino Crisis demonstrated the joys of combining modern military hardware with Triassic-period beasts, but in recent times dinosaur action has all but died out. Capcom's Exoprimal is something of a revival then, a co-op third-person action title that offers dynamic combat with hordes of raptors, tyrannosaurs, triceratops and other ancient reptiles. It's an eye-catching blend of third-person action titles, combining lightning-fast horde modes with inter-team competition. The question is, can the RE Engine cope with the vast dinosaur armies - and can Exoprimal deliver a good technical experience alongside its impressive scale?
Unlike many of its forebears, Exoprimal is a polished shooter game that centres around co-op PVE combat. Each match pits two teams of five players against each other as they tackle objectives in a fixed sequence, typically tasks like defending an area or defeating a specific enemy dinosaur. The team that completes this series of objectives first wins, and in some matches the two teams will fight each other at the end. It's an effective structure that provides a good enough excuse to justify the action.
Each player picks a 'hero' mech suit at the start of each round of after a death, with each hero option animatingly nicely, coming with a distinct set of moves and serving a compelling purpose in the context of each match. Assault suits deal damage and avoid enemies, tanks soak up enemy hits and shield allies, and support suits perform crowd control and healing roles. Each unit has a visually distinct silhouette and conspicuous attack animations, so the action is easy enough to read even from a distance. It's a compelling formula that makes for fun and lively action, so the game is certainly well-made from a gameplay perspective.
There's also plenty to appreciate in terms of the visuals. Exoprimal has effective indirect lighting throughout, with light bouncing and scattering through constrained indoor environments. As a cross-gen title, the game doesn't feature any tech that truly pushes current-gen hardware, but the lighting looks quite good in the heat of battle. There's a limited ability to resolve fine detail here but I do think it's effective enough all things considered. The environmental artwork also shines in some maps, with a good variety of aesthetically distinct locations which is critical for a multiplayer game. Key locations are distinguishable from a distance, and this is backed up by waypoint-style navigation.
Exoprimal's signature visual element is undoubtedly the gigantic swarms of dinosaurs (up to 10,000 at a time) that you face at every objective. Raptors spill out of portals like paint, flooding the battlefield with foes. These waist-high enemies go down quickly, but can quickly overwhelm players if you let them get too close. This is all handled without resorting to reduced-rate animation too, which has often been used in RE Engine titles to mitigate CPU demands.
The dinosaur swarms do demand certain concessions though, most notably that smaller raptors don't cast shadows to avoid a significant performance cost. This wouldn't be as visually obvious - especially in bright maps - if the developers had resorted to other techniques, like static texture-based blob shadows or capsule shadows or something similar, but instead these dinosaurs don't have any sort of grounding to the environment and seem somewhat disconnected. All of the dinosaur models of a certain type also look very similar to each other, if not identical, and more visual variety would have been appreciated. Still, the huge dinosaur crowds are an impressive visual feat.
The other problem I took some issue with is the game's low-quality screen-space reflections (SSR). This issue has been endemic amongst recent RE Engine releases and proves distracting here, with obvious occlusion issues any time a character intersects with the reflective surface - and the cubemap used as a fallback often appears much brighter than the SSR-based reflection. In general, the screen-space reflections also tend to look a noisy and unstable. This isn't an issue specific to Exoprimal, but it needs to be addressed, even if that just means removing the effect entirely. On the plus side, the opening cutscene does feature more coherent RT reflections.
Ultimately Exoprimal is trying to do something interesting from a technical perspective with its dinosaur hordes, which we don't see very often in modern games. It feels almost like a game from the PS3/360 era, where developers often experimented with new game concepts and played with scale in ways largely absent from recent titles. The game's Gears of War-esque characters and focus on synthetic characters also invites some comparisons to generations past. A quick glance at Exoprimal in action will make the limitations of Capcom's approach clear, but the game looks decent enough considering its scale and cross-gen roots.
Exoprimal is a fairly simple game from an image quality perspective, with each current-gen console having one mode targeting 60fps, with a 2160p image on the premium consoles and 1440p on Series S which appears a bit softer but not disastrously so. Outside of image clarity differences, Series S also exhibits lower texture resolution than PS5 or Series X, with certain assets exhibiting blurrier, slightly chunky 2D art on close inspection.
Image reconstruction is used on each platform, specifically checkerboard rendering, but these artefacts are largely hidden by the game's fairly strong motion blur (which can't be disabled). There's also an odd-looking static grain that is visible against certain structures and also shows up prominently in the edges of shadows. It's definitely a visual annoyance, though it's more obvious close-up on a monitor than it is on a large format TV.
High frame-rates are of course critical for multiplayer shooters, but the 60fps target does have performance issues at times, which are more pronounced on some platforms than others. PS5 and Series X hit 60fps most of the time and feel responsive, but the game does drop frames with some regularity. In the most challenging sections, the game drops to the 50s for extended periods, while in cutscenes it's possible to reach the 40s as ray tracing is enabled - perhaps suggesting a 30fps cap would have made sense.
Series S faces more significant performance challenges, with more regular and substantial frame drops. Expect a readout in the 40s and 50s during gameplay, with plenty of judder too if you're not using a VRR display. Cutscenes also run in less-than-ideal shape, dropping to the 30s at worst with highly inconsistent frame-times. VRR-capable displays do solve the majority of these issues, even on PS5 with its 48Hz-60Hz VRR window. On a non-VRR display though, the experience does leave something to be desired, particularly on Series S. Consistency is key for multiplayer shooters, and Exoprimal isn't delivering here as it probably should be.
From a rendering perspective, Exoprimal clearly makes some substantial compromises to achieve its dinosaur hordes. Environments aren't super detailed and the lack of shadowing for the smaller dinosaur models can be noticeable at times. Frame-rates aren't ideal either, with the title falling short of a 60fps update quite often on PS5 and Series X, and most of the time on Series S. However, Exoprimal does at least pull off huge gameplay-relevant enemy groups, which is a cool feat we don't often see in modern titles. You can easily encounter hundreds of enemies at once in any given combat encounter, which looks great in motion, and the environments come across well with attractive lighting and distinctive artwork.
Capcom should consider some key changes to make Exoprimal substantially better on current-gen consoles. An (optional) cut-back resolution target could open up the performance headroom we'd need to achieve a locked 60fps in gameplay, while dropping SSR would eliminate the most obvious visual artefacts. With those two changes, I think Exoprimal would fare a lot better on current-gen hardware. Beyond this, implementing some sort of shadowing for the smaller dinosaurs, even something relatively crude, would bring the visuals together during large confrontations.
For now though, Exoprimal is a fun and polished co-op action title that delivers on its dinosaur-demolishing premise on PS5, Series X and Series S - but with a little more polish, it could be better yet.