Exoborne Has A Not-So-Secret Weapon In Its Crowded Genre
Extraction shooters have taken over battle royale as the PvP genre du jour. Load out, drop in, loot up, and hopefully escape with your life; it’s a fun gameplay loop and has already been done in a number of different frameworks, from hardcore settings like Escape From Tarkov to the haunted bayou of Hunt Showdown. Heck, even Call of Duty tried it with its short-lived mode, DMZ. For a new game to stand out and survive in this competitive genre, it has to do something different, and Sharkmob’s Exoborne may have just the thing to put some distance between itself and its countless counterparts.
I hesitate to call Exoborne’s best feature a hidden gem or a secret weapon since there’s really nothing subtle about it. The game drops players into a futuristic open world where corporate intervention has inadvertently accelerated climate change rather than solving it as intended, and the setting, as a result, looks much like a typical video game.
Lush wilderness clashes with massive human-made structures that are remnants of the failed climate project. Dilapidated buildings ask to be picked apart for survival scraps. The post-apocalyptic setting is as typical of video games as the playable armored-up warriors you control and the diverse gear you’ll seek out to build your perfect future soldier. As a third-person extraction shooter, it would be a pretty, but perhaps pretty standard, experience.
