A game that I can only imagine is a big technical experiment ahead of Monster Hunter and other games in the pipeline, much like the games plot justification of repeated testing to create the ultimate mechsuit.

Exoprimal has a pretty generic core loop of: Shoot dinosaurs and occasionally shoot players.
But every so often, just enough to keep you going, it will throw something absolutely buck wild at you.

It might suddenly put both 5-player teams together against an even bigger boss, or give you an MMO style raid boss, complete with AoEs to dodge.

It all culminates in an explosive finale that brings everything together.

Story wide, it had a surprisingly endearing cast of characters that it drip feeds throughout the experience, setting itself up for more adventures if Capcom decides to come back.

I don't know if I can recommend it outside of Gamepass, and it's pretty long, but it's a hoot & a holler, and I guarantee you've never seen anything like it.

I think I almost really enjoyed this. There's a bunch of stuff I love like levelling a load of different classes and finding some broken combinations between them, and the combat is mostly pretty fun!
On the other hand, some of the boss fights (and bits of combat in general) feel super rough and enemies not flinching (outside of specific moves) always feels bad.
The game throws so much loot at you, it feels like you're constantly just swapping stuff out. There's a blacksmith which I NEVER used, but I assume it becomes important in the post-game.
I feel like I never really got into it as much as I could, so I reckon I'll pick up the DLCs.

The story is mostly whatever, but I really enjoyed the final act.

This made me retroactively hate the game.

It's insane that this came out AFTER Devil May Cry.
Imagine DMC and Drakengard had a kid, but it was dogshit.

Every fight with a monster spawner ended up with me having to jump slash it for like a minute. Thinking I was going insane I looked at multiple lets plays and apparently that's just what the game is.

https://youtu.be/aQIGi1cfA-U?si=hT5f13bUhlzJg2PO&t=3585

Cannot recommend at all

Yeah... It's fine!
Looks great, well written and acted, but it's so full of stuff that comes to nothing (I know it's intentional) that the whole thing was just a bit deflating at the end.
Had a fair few technical issues with it too, clearly skipping a few bits of plot/dialogue as a result, which did not help.

I've put it off and expected to really enjoy it, but yeah, pretty disappointed! Oh well!

Considering the reputation this game has, I was shocked by how janky the whole thing feels, which really put a dampener on my experience.
Loads of wee collision bugs, a few progression bugs, a floaty character, a camera that can’t decide what it’s doing… it’s just really rough and I didn’t find it very fun to play.
None of the levels really inspired me. The incredibly vertical first level was a nightmare until I worked out you could change the camera behaviour in the settings (an option which apparently doesn’t exist on console!) so I could look down.

The boss fights all outstay their welcome a surprising amount.
I could go on about the character controller, but I just wasn’t feeling it.
The 3D art style didn’t hit for me at all, and didn’t manage to capture the very charming 2D work.
It also has one of the worst Scottish accents I’ve come across and had me sliding that voice volume right to zero.

It’s a real shame for me, because there’s obviously a huge amount of passion here, and I would definitely play the team’s next efforts. You can see, as you go through the game, that they got better as they made it.

Sorry this is a downer! I wish I liked it more!

An ambitious roguelike Castlevania with interesting ideas but probably the most underbaked execution I’ve ever seen.
If this was a studios first game I’d be impressed, but it is so rough I’m amazed it was released in the state it is.

It’s intended to have Smash Bros. style controls which just barely works.
Every enemy in the game has the same(ish) skill set as you, but are much much better than you and are constantly reading your inputs, insta-grabbing, and perfect parrying you.

I played in co-op which is apparently supposed to have friendly fire on, but I can’t imagine a more hellosh experience when confined to a small battle arena with this combat system.

You might be curious to try it out and see how well it executes on its ideas: do not.

Also the online is occasionally non-functional.

I stuck it out the whole way this time and wish I hadn't.
And incredibly interesting premise and lovely looking game that's so full of small baffling design decisions it just breaks the whole thing apart.

It's a Shmup Metroidvania Deckbuilder. Except it's a bad at all of those things.

As a Shmup, your character has a huge hitbox and there's often so many particles on screen there's no way you can dodge them, so you have to rely heavily on bullet clearing cards. Even when you see the bullets coming, you'll often clip one because of your massive hit box.

As a 'vania, it's mostly linear with some very tedious backtracking on account of your slow movement speed. Most of the exploration mechanics you get are used a handful of times and don't really round out your arsenal.

As a deckbuilder, it could have improved the shmup combat, but in practice you get SO many bad cards that there's not much point in exploring. The fact that the cards are randomly assigned to buttons means you're usually best to just spam them.

Enemies are bullet sponges with bullet patterns that often punish dodging (again, pushing you toward bullet clearing spells).

All armor is temporary, except one broke-as-hell late game card that lets you restore a heart.

The writing is groan inducing and reads like a dream conversation with all your pals (and you cannot skip it).

Checkpoints are often terrible.

Difficulty spikes are often.

There's a bad submarine section, which is not as bad as a lot of people seem to make out.

I was so up for this game, and I feel like it's not a million miles away from being good! Building a good deck (eventually) feels great!

But the execution is not there and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.