My first few rounds of upcoming extraction shooter Exoborne was full of surprises: For starters, I survived and my team managed to extract every round, albeit narrowly. Secondly, not once was I helplessly sniped during extraction by someone crouching in a distant bush. Thirdly, almost every fight was a fun, aggressive knockabout encounter. And finally, I actually came away from an extraction shooter still wanting to play more.
I shouldn’t be too surprised. Developer Sharkmob’s previous game—Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodhunt—didn’t find the success it deserved, but I enjoyed its messy, high-mobility battle royale combat more than most of its competitors. Exoborne shares some of that undead DNA, recontextualized as sci-fi exo-suits in several weight-classes, with powers on cooldowns and a third-person camera that snaps to first when aiming down your (satisfyingly chunky) gun’s sights. The Exos themselves aren’t that interesting to look at, lacking the personality of Vampire’s clans or Apex’s cartoonish mercs, but they do offer a lot of customizability beyond your choice of (pleasantly punchy) guns.
Exoborne falls into the same broad category of high risk, tense multiplayer shooters as Escape From Tarkov, but my experience felt more like Apex Legends in power armor. Rounds are short and fast-paced, with three-player squads (you can deploy with fewer, but it’s inadvisable) dropping asynchronously into the map, each with a 20 minute timer ticking down. While completing some objectives in the field (fighting against NPC robots and soldiers, mostly) can extend that, you ideally want to be calling in an extraction chopper to one of the escape zones to get out before then, as running out the clock marks your location on the map for all other teams, painting you as a vulnerable target.
Another thing Exoborne shares with Apex Legends and Bloodhunt is verticality. Set in the aftermath of an environmental apocalypse, there’s toppled ruins, sinkholes and big sci-fi structures all over, and (depending on your suit’s weight class) you can be zipping around with a grappling hook or chargeable power-jump every few seconds, then gliding back down with a re-deployable parachute.
The movement basics are fun, especially when paired with each suit’s melee attacks. Heavy suits get a shockwave-generating ground-pound, light suits have an energy sword and mediums a quirky but very satisfying power-punch that also launches a delayed-detonation explosive charge. All of these can be performed midair, not only buying you some extra air time, but adding a bit of Attack On Titan-esque acrobatic anime flair to the combat that extends beyond your choice of gun.
Storm chasers
Violent weather events frequently whip across the map, too. While Sharkmob promises more dynamic weather in the full game, the most common hurdle in my session were tornadoes, which limit visibility but allow daring players to ride the gale-force winds using their parachutes, speeding your way across the map and onto high structures—or die horribly if you miscalculate and get sucked into the vortex.
Those powerful winds certainly helped my crew navigate a land-bound oil rig, the centerpiece of the map. It was a complex structure filled with tunnels and sub-buildings, with an extraction point on the main deck. If you can hold that top level, it’s an easily defensible place to extract from, but its central location and elevation invites trouble, leading to some messy multi-team brawls.
Victory didn’t mean I avoided taking some lumps either. With longer than average time-to-kill, it’s more forgiving than most extraction shooters or even battle royale games. Getting beat down to zero health puts you in a familiar downed state, while dying causes you to become partially lootable, but it’s not the end of your run even if you die. Teammates can revive fallen players on the spot, meaning that if you leave even one member of a three-man squad alive, there’s still a chance they’ll all come back for revenge unless you properly finish them. Given that light Exos are extremely capable of escaping a fight (able to use their grappling hook and other mobility tools every few seconds) and hiding somewhere fiddly to get to, there’s a solid chance of a near-wipe turning into a comeback.
My session at Sharkmob’s office in Malmo, Sweden didn’t afford enough time to get a feel for Exoborne’s long-term progression, but speaking with the developers revealed that there’s a very different underlying philosophy from the likes of Tarkov’s cutthroat calculus. While all your equipped gear and everything you’ve looted is at risk each round, it’s quick and easy to jump into a map, scoop up some basic gear and extract. Money and materials used to purchase gear can be stockpiled, allowing players to build up a buffer and be able to rebuy quickly if needed, and the studio have promised that there will be no seasonal server wipes.
That continuity over time should reduce the risks faced as players work their way up the ranks to challenge tougher maps that promise higher-tier loot. It’s a similar approach to Crytek’s less punishing foray into extraction shooters, Hunt: Showdown.
That also sums up my impression of Exoborne—a slightly more casual, more mass-market take on a typically brutal genre. Its focus on short rounds, near-instant action, class-based teamplay and revivals means that successes might not feel quite as gratifying as surviving within an inch of your life in Tarkov, but with that tradeoff comes potentially much less frustration. Between the friendlier mechanics and Michael Bay enviro-pocalypse aesthetics, Sharkmob seem to be applying a little bit of big budget gloss to extraction, if potentially sanding down some of the more interesting rough edges along the way.
Survival plan
Given that Exoborne has the backing of Tencent-owned publisher Level Infinite, and Sharkmob has grown into a sizeable studio with multiple teams and an in-house mocap studio, I got the impression that Sharkmob is much better prepared now to keep up with the demands of a live-service game. The plan for Exoborne is to punctuate your multiplayer progression with personal story quests and narrative structure, exploring how the world fell into apocalyptic disrepair, and keep this story potentially running for years to come.
Sharkmob remains cagey on the details of monetization, but it has confirmed that Exoborne will be a full-priced retail game. A risky play, but one I hope pans out.
As someone who has bounced off every extraction shooter I’ve played so far, I’m quietly hoping that this is the one that gets me onboard with the nascent genre. Despite being a raw alpha build mostly aimed at internal testers (with shaky framerate, visual bugs and several major features planned to be totally overhauled by the first public beta), I enjoyed my brief time with the game. Whether the studio has the manpower and funding to keep up with the demands of a content-hungry audience is another matter.
