izigame.me

After hitting the triple digits in levels, finally decided to post a review. The TLDR is that Exoprimal is a fun game that's pretty well made, but also missing a lot of features and is misleading in a lot of its features. If the gameplay videos interest you, you'll probably like it enough, but I'd wait for it to go on sale considering how much content it has now.
For a longer review, Exoprimal is fairly well designed overall with minimal bugs and issues. None of the suits are bad, and are simply suited towards different tasks with varying difficulty levels, encouraging your team to diversify and swap as needed mid game. The fights are fun, there's a decent variety of enemies, and the couple boss fights it has can have some tense and entertaining moments. Its progression system is fairly basic, but decently rewarding, though it's a but silly that they won't even give you gold for leveling your exo's past level 20 and only pay up when you go up in overall level. It also has no microtransactions. All chests are easily farmed in game with no way to purchase them with real cash to fuel a gambling addiction. They have a few DLC outfits and a battlepass, both of which are entirely unnecessary to play the game.
That said, it has issues. And some pretty infuriating ones too that often make me just go 'Why?!'
For starters, the game is almost entirely competitive. I hesitate to use the word PvP, but truthfully that's what it is. There's plenty of people claiming that 'it's only 10% of the match and totally optional'. It is not. Even in the 'PvE' mode, you are competing with another team, and not only in a time attack, which can be in itself rather frustrating when you're simply trying to enjoy a game or two of dino hordes. This is exacerbated by the Dominator, a consumable item drop that spawns for each time during the Final Mission that allows a player to go into the opposite teams world as a dinosaur and cause complete havoc. It's also the single biggest factor in the game, able to undo absolute massive amounts of progress, or propel you so far into the lead the opposing team has no chance of victory, turning what were once smooth games into frustrating failure...with a punishment of a 30% EXP cut. An interesting mechanic, sure...for a PvP game mode where you want to PvP. Which PvE is not. In other words, even in the 'PvE' game mode, it is often times the PvP that defines the match.
And even if you don't count that as 'true' PvP, there's the fact that you can simply be placed into a straight up PvP match anyways. Some of them are 'core missions' for the story, by which I mean there's maybe two story relevant voice lines and *maybe* a short cinematic that could have been easily placed in a PvE mission. And that's a maybe. Often times, there seems to be no reason whatsoever for you to be forced into this game. So you'll give up your 20% bonus EXP for playing random because you decided to chill, and then get placed into a PvP match anyways, except without the payout the other players queueing random get. That's a problem. You are actively punished and your desires ignored, which in general leaves a sour taste behind, especially as there is almost no way to know when a match will result in PvP unless you've memorized the missions. Hilariously enough, PvP mission results are often less influenced by the actual PvP portion of the mission compared to the PvE games. After all, the Dominator isn't the only one who can kill the players, meaning suits like Murasame and Zephyr can wreak havoc in the back lines if the enemies are careless rather than leaving them completely unimpeded to widen the gap.
There's also the fact that the game just feels...incomplete. Don't get me wrong, what they have is fun, for both the PvE and PvP game modes. But the story feels lazy, being a handful of short cutscenes that play in between absolutely bog standard game rounds, and about a hundred voice recordings. The game modes themselves feel like something which should have been an add on to a bigger, better game, one where you can actually team up to run proper missions through out this big beautiful island, rather than a couple copy paste mission objectives done for no reason other than to 'collect data'. The what I presume is 'horde' game mode isn't even released yet.
Exoprimal is fun. I honestly love it. I've spent basically all my free time since its launch playing it, both the PvE and PvP modes. I've leveled every Exo to max level, learned their playstyle and how they work, and genuinely love how different they all play. But a weird split off PvE mode that isn't even a true PvE mode? Being randomly tossed into games you didn't sign up for? A million small missing quality of life features that every other game has? And what feels like a half finished product? I just can't recommend this game, not at $60.00. Give it some time, see if they update anything, add any features, maybe go on sale. But until then, save your money for something more considerate.