#Team fortress gameplay series#

Like the food critic in Ratatouille, I was brought back to a halcyon time when esports ability wasn’t so coveted, and it was more about having fun pushing a payload with your friends on Gold Rush or fighting through the mall mobs in Dead Center. It quickly became apparent that Capcom’s latest is a very different breed of hero shooter, one in which it’s far more about efficiency and communication than being “cracked.” Regardless, I gradually learned how I could complement my squad’s abilities as I climbed through the proficiency ranks, assigning and upgrading modules that changed my hero’s skills in meaningful ways. As tough as it would have been to give up on being a Barrage lifer, I would have preferred not being able to double up the suits within a team to maximise potential tactical creativity. However, given that each suit has its own proprietary progression system, there is little incentive to switch once you’ve found your favorite, which is firstly a major shame given the effort that has gone into crafting the 10-strong roster’s builds, but it also creates inevitable team composition issues once a meta hardens around Exoprimal. Launching grenades at the horde and watching Skywave’s gravity well draw the dinosaurs together as Roadblock unleashes a tornado of doom is so satisfying, and it opens up opportunities for melee characters like Zephyr to swoop in and pummel the raptors as they whip around in sequence like they’re stuck in a cosmic washing machine. Exoprimal is at its best when your team isn’t doubling up on suits, allowing for maximum synergy. In Barrage’s case, this ends with his ultimate, where you can turn into a gigantic missile and wipe out an entire five-stack of human players.ĭespite briefly moonlighting as a sniper far away from the action, embracing the more immediate chaos as Barrage allowed me to quickly understand the assignment. Exoprimal’s mechanics are tight and well up to Capcom’s high standards - stringing together these button presses is a satisfying kinetic process that allows you to enter a flow state of mayhem. He pumps out bouncy explosives with a satisfying clunk and has a complementary stun grenade for clumping together raptors.

Oh, and if you pick up one of the randomly spawning “Dominator” power-ups, you can transform into a Triceratops, teleport into enemy territory, and wreak scaly havoc.Įxoprimal is at its best when your team is aiming for maximum synergyīarrage is a fiery-haired blend of Team Fortress 2’s Demoman and Overwatch’s Junkrat.

You can now interfere directly with the enemy by blowing up their payload or pulling off a sneaky gank.

#Team fortress gameplay series#

Said wargames manifest as 5v5 player-versus-environment-versus-player multiplayer matches, where you push through a series of cooperative dinosaur defense objectives while translucent phantoms indicate the location of your human enemies, showing you whether you need to speed up or take it easy.Ĭomplete your tasks, though, and suddenly both teams are thrust onto the same playing field as a final assignment looms, and this is where the magic happens. You play as Ace, a mute rookie who joins a patrol squad that quickly ends up stranded in an alternate timeline, where a rogue Leviathan is forcing exosuits to take part in endless wargames masqueraded as combat tests. But hold on, let me give it a go: Rifts in the fabric of space-time have brought hordes of dinosaurs to Earth, necessitating the manufacture of exosuits to repel the invasion, as well as an advanced artificial intelligence called Leviathan, whose prime directive is to train fighters and monitor the operation.

Its mixed-media opening blends a breaking news segment with a corporate recruitment campaign, and somehow, the game manages to make its absurd (albeit refreshingly unserious) near-future premise borderline impossible to explain. Exoprimal makes a terrible first impression.