Entertainment

Capcom dinosaur game Exoprimal looks gloriously stupid on PS5

March 10, 2022

Exoprimal – there’s no game that can’t be improved by the addition of dinosaurs (pic: Capcom)

The biggest announcement from the PlayStation State of Play was a new dinosaur game from the makers of Dino Crisis.

Horizon Forbidden West is great and all but it does take itself awfully seriously for a game about giant robot dinosaurs. Actually, most of the robots are just based on normal animals but it’s the closest thing there’s been to a big budget dinosaur game in years… or at least until now.

During the latest PlayStation State of Play event, Capcom revealed Exporimal, a third person co-op game where you don mech suits to fight dinosaurs that fall from the sky like rain.

The tone is thoroughly tongue in check, which you don’t tend to see a lot of nowadays, and very reminiscent of older Japanese games from the Xbox 360 era or thereabouts.

It’s also oddly reminiscent of Earth Defence Force, with hordes of raptors acting as cannon fodder and larger dinosaurs like a T-Rex and a Triceratops seeming to play the role of bosses.

Although it’s not really made clear by the trailer, a Capcom blog clarifies that Exoprimal is a 5 vs. 5 multiplayer game with varying objectives, including transporting cargo, protecting an area of the map, or attacking the other team.

There are multiple different mech suits, with the one with a shield you can see in the trailer, another that can fly, and another that specialises in melee combat – although you can swap between them all mid-battle.

What was also not made clear in the initial announcement is that the game is both cross-gen and multiformat, so it’ll be on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5, and PC. There’s no exact release date but it’s due out in 2023.

That’s about it in terms of official information but fans are already wondering whether it’s a secret Dino Crisis game, as while there’s nothing obvious in the trailer to tie the two franchises together there’s much speculation that the mysterious figure at the end is Dino Crisis protagonist Regina.

That may just be wishful thinking but there were a lot of rumours a few years ago that Capcom was planning a remake of Dino Crisis in the style of Resident Evil 2, but it supposedly got cancelled.

If that’s true, it’s not hard to imagine that perhaps remnants of it were repurposed to become the backbone of Exoprimal.