This past weekend, at the Summer Game Fest: Play Days event in Los Angeles, the good people at Sharkmob and Level Infinite gave me an opportunity to play the upcoming sci-fi, third-person, open world, extraction shooter Exoborne, which is coming to PC this year, and to PlayStation 5 and Xbox X|S at a later date.
What follows are my impressions of this game.
Like other extraction shooters,
Exoborne tasks you with infiltrating an area, completing your mission, and getting out with all your fingers and toes intact.
In the case of Exoborne, these missions can be completed with up to three people in your squad, though you can go it alone or as a duo. You also don’t all have to leave at the same time, either; if someone wants to stay back, they’re more than welcome.
Though you might not want to go it alone. While trying to complete your mission, so are other teams of players, and if you cross paths, they’ll try to kill you. Not because that’s their mission — this isn’t like an objective-based multiplayer mode in Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6, with teams on opposing sides — rather, it’s because if you die, they can search your corpse for sweet, sweet loot.
Oh, and just to be clear: if you lose something in a game of Exoborne, it’s gone. Forever. Or until you find another one on someone else’s dead body.
Also, at any given time in Exoborne,
there will be more than two teams on a map (though the Sharkmob folk are still working out how many), as well as computer-controlled enemies who are also gunning for you.
Now, to help you overcome these obstacles, and to complete your mission, Exoborne gives you an exo-suit, one that reminded me more of the augmented harness Tom Cruise had in Edge Of Tomorrow than Master Chief’s Mjolnir armor or the package harness system Sam has in the upcoming Death Stranding 2: On The Beach.
Exo-suits are also fully upgradable and customizable, both aesthetically and functionally, and in ways that will remind you of other games. For instance, the Viper STR7 suit — one of the three in the game — comes with a grappling hook like the one in Halo Infinite, jump jet boots that let you double jump, and a glider reminiscent of ones in the Far Cry and Just Cause games.
Just be careful with the glider.
Along with the enemy players, and computer-controlled combatants, Exoborne also pits you against extreme weather conditions. Get struck during a lightning storm, for instance, and some of your exo-suit’s systems may go offline.
There may also be tornados, which can send things flying. Like, for example, all the containers of gasoline someone left lying around, clearly unaware that “firenado” is now a word in the English language.
To show off how this all works in Exoborne, we were dropped onto a map called Maynard, which is the largest of three that will be available at launch. Our mission: to retrieve some important information, and to locate and (hopefully) rescue a team that had been sent in earlier.
Dropping in,
we were immediately confronted by some trigger-happy enemies. But things didn’t get easier once we dispatched them; we still had to navigate a multi-tiered world that tested our skills with both the grappling hook and the glider wings equally.
Which isn’t to say we didn’t get shot at while trying to get around. We did, by both other players and NPCs. Good thing the game has solid and familiar controls, and that you can both revive yourself when you’re badly hurt, and can repair your armor on the fly. Well, assuming you remembered to bring the right kits before you leave the staging area.
This was especially helpful after we completed our mission, went to the extraction point, and called for a ride. To do this, you have to turn on a beacon, but this immediately informs everyone that you’re leaving. Which, in turn, may prompt people to come say goodbye…by shooting you in the face and taking your stuff.
Sadly,
while our one round of Exoborne did give us a sense of the weapons, gunfights, and navigation, we didn’t get to experience the weather effects. Because these conditions are random, it’s entirely possible that you might have clear blue skies when you, say, play a quick mission at a video game event.
Guess we’ll just have to wait until the game comes out to see how that changes things.
