With the blurb “Gear up, get in, and get out”, Exoborne elegantly units out its stall as an extraction shooter. However they not noted the most vital half: “Get blown round by an enormous twister”. Whereas Exoborne bears all the options you’d count on from the likes of Escape from Tarkov and Name of Obligation: Warzone’s DMZ, the most enjoyable half of a presentation I noticed at Play Days was when developer Sharkmob talked about the climate.
Exoborne’s setting is just not postapocalyptic, however moderately midapocalyptic, with the world falling aside throughout you – the outcome of mankind’s meddling with the local weather. Mission Rebirth’s makes an attempt to offer limitless clear power have backfired considerably, and now Mom Nature is taking her revenge.
Extraction shooters dwell or die on emergent gameplay, and there’s nothing as emergent as a tornado, flood or tsunami. The climate throughout a session of Exoborne can change from clement to hellscape in minutes – all of which has profound results on gameplay, in response to Sharkmob.
A ten-minute walkthrough video primarily based on a pre-Alpha construct of the recreation started with a brief cutscene the place a gaggle of teammates referred to as The Reborn assemble in a dropship and put together to leap. The character fashions are primarily based on no matter skins and loadouts every participant has chosen, so this can be a good likelihood to indicate off your aptitude earlier than the motion begins.
The gamers then skydived from the dropship, parachuting in to the map beneath. Motion kicked off instantly, as this space of Colton County in the Southeast USA was infested with killer robotic machines and human enemies.
Kill, loot, equip – to this point, so extraction shooter. Getting into a base positioned close by required some teamwork, and the destruction of some AT-ST-like enemy walkers, whereas at one other level the squad clambered aboard a Warthog-style armored automobile with open high/sides/again for ease of blasting. Maps are as vertical as they’re extensive, with towers linked by large Rebirth Cables that snake by way of the setting, positioned by the architects at Rebirth with out regard for the surroundings or the human residents; these industrial eyesores enable gamers to ascend with grappling hooks and combat on increased floor. Burned-out faculty buses and a busted motel signal litter the abandoned streets of what may way back have been an idyllic rural city. Sinkholes provide the likelihood to discover underground.
After which got here the twister warning. As soon as the climate hit, the squad lower their mission quick, calling in the dropship and climbing aboard with the loot earlier than issues obtained bushy. However a Sharkmob developer defined that over an extended play session, you possibly can count on a dynamic vary of climates to impede your progress. The rain apparently will get so heavy you possibly can now not hear your teammates, their comms drowned out by the deluge, forcing gamers to rethink their methods.
Whereas the danger could also be excessive in any given session, Sharkmob has designed Exoborne to be extra forgiving in the long term. That’s, extraction is just not at all times assured, and you could lose objects in a given session when you don’t make it out alive – however the recreation makes it attainable to rebuild your arsenal over future video games, bettering your character from recreation to recreation as you loot and progress. The concept is to make the recreation as approachable as attainable for newcomers, who could discover the excessive danger of different extraction shooters off-putting.
Throw in a bunch of cool near-future weapons, tech gear and Exo-Rigs, and of course a mixture of PVP and PVE scavenging motion, and Exoborne is shaping as much as be a cool addition to the style.