As I wait for the dropship to pick me up, I reflect on just how badly this run had gone.
It started — as all deployments do — with my character, a freshly-ressurrected cyberzombie clad in an armored exoskeleton, jumping out of a helicopter into a warzone..
The assignment was a simple one. I was to make my way to the designated pickup zone and scavenge all the valuables I could find along the way. If a few bandits or cannibals happened to get gunned down, there was a bonus in it for me. Had I stuck to the plan, things might have gone well, but just two minutes in I spotted a Revival Artifact — one of the most valuable pieces of tech available in the wasteland.
Unfortunately, retrieving it requires a few minutes of decoding, during which wave after wave of mechs will be sent to defend it.
I’d foolishly brought along a precision rifle this time. It’s a heavy-hitting semi-auto great for picking off foes from a hundred meters away, but far less effective against the swarming biped robots that spent the next three minutes chasing me, barely leaving me any opportunity to regenerate my health as I waited for the decoding counter to run down.
Finally the last mech exploded and I returned to my Artifact — I’d managed to survive a half-dozen close calls and scavenge this top-tier bit of gear, and I even had ample time to get back on-mission and make it to my pickup. I thought I had it made… Which is when the Scarab arrived.
A four-legged tank, the Scarab sports an ultra-fast machinegun with infinite ammo that never overheats or needs reloading. The way to beat it is to flank it with multiple players, but since I was rolling solo, I had only one advantage — it has to put its gun away to move, and then stop to deploy it again. By breaking line of sight I could generate a two-second window in which it was vulnerable — but I had to be careful to not get too far away, because that would trigger its long-range defenses, rolling bombs that would home in on me.
What followed was nearly fifteen minutes of tricking a tank into thinking it had a chance to kill me, and then gradually stripping away its health until it gave up the ghost.
Any triumph I felt was undercut by the fact that I had just two minutes to cross the half-kilometer between me and my pickup location before the mission ended, either with a successful exfiltration… or my head exploding as the people who were responsible for my rebirth locked onto my signal and pushed a button.
Exoborne is the latest entry in the extraction shooter genre — the type of game in which players are dropped into a location, tasked with scavenging as much as possible within a strict time limit, and then attempting to get away with the loot before rival players gun them down and pillage their corpses. This one is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by superstorms caused by global warming.
Now, survivors scrounge the blasted landscape for any pieces of old-world tech they can find. This is a world where a jar of peanut butter is significantly more valuable than a box of ammunition, and people are happy to pay for creature comforts now that everything has gone to hell – one of the more valuable items I came across was a package of toilet paper.
After generating a character and playing a tutorial to get a handle on the controls, I was dropped into the Exoborne‘s world — it’s a foreboding landscape where threats are as likely to come from the quickly changing weather as enemy NPCs or greedy players.
The developers have built a map that’s incredibly exciting to explore. From the moment they’re dropped into battle using their always-available glider, players will be surrounded by a stunningly crafted vision of destroyed America. The rusted-out cars, shattered storefronts and shanty towns cobbled together to protect people from ceaseless storms have a gritty authenticity that serves to ground all of the action.
That grounded feeling extends to the unusually satisfying movement mechanics. The player may have access to an exoskeleton, but they won’t find themselves bouncing around the map like characters from Fortnite or Titanfall. The running, jumping, and sliding on offer doesn’t feel far beyond the realm of human ability, while special movement tech (the aforementioned glider and a grappling hook) allowing quick vertical ascent and descent as the situation requires. This feeling of realistic movement plays an important role in the way Exoborne builds spectacle — by making the player feel like an improved human rather than a super-powered being, the threat of random weather effects is magnified. A guy in power armor with an assault rifle might think he’s tough, but all of that gets stripped away when a firenado is bearing down on them.
The main action of Exoborne is built around scavenging as much as possible as quickly as possible, then making it out alive. Just how they do it is up to the player — pick fights with bandits and cannibals and swipe their gear? A perfectly viable option.
Go searching through the ruins of stores and homes looking for damaged tech and bottles of booze? Just as valid.
They can even hack high-tech machines to produce valuable intel.
Then, of course, there’s the way of the pirate — wait for another player to do the work of finding resources, then kill them and steal their hard-won prizes. That might seem like a cold thing to do (and it doesn’t exactly come up in the tutorial) but it’s not like the game accidentally sends out a map notification whenever a player has called for an extraction.
With a large arsenal of moddable weapons and three different exosuits available, Exoborne has plenty of options for different playstyles. Backstabbing, sniping, and charging into battle are all viable tactics, and with a large variety of enemy types to combat, scavenging is a compelling challenge even without the PVP action — although that always adds a little extra tension, especially because new players are constantly being dropped onto the map. I might be on minute 18, running out of ammo and armor kits, desperate to make it out with a backpack full of power tools and gently used laptops, but the player on my tail could have just dropped into the map, fully equipped and ready to run me down.
When GameCritics was invited to the Exoborne playtest I didn’t know what to expect. I’d never seen much appeal in the extraction genre, finding it frequently little more than a deathmatch by another name. However, Exoborne‘s developers have done such a great job of building a breathing, changing world full of dire threats that I found myself eager to jump back into the action over and over, even though I knew that there was always a good chance I’d wind up in some jackal’s sights.
Regardless, Exoborne offers such a great experience that it may have turned me around on the whole genre — I can’t wait to see what the finished game is like.
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