Key Preview Takeaways:
- It’s a three-player PvE shooter with a novel premise: you’re an everyman in a sci-fi world.
- Jobs that required cooperation were among my favorites during my hands-on session.
- Chaos and tension are baked into the gameplay, which added to my enjoyment of it.
Video games generally want you to feel special. We play chosen ones, genetically enhanced soldiers in power armor, superheroes, major and minor deities, legendary swordsmen. We live out lives that are very unlike our own. That’s the fantasy. With Exterminauts, developer Behaviour Interactive wants you to be a working man. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll still be visiting faraway planets and battling some really wild alien beasties. But ultimately, you’re working a 9-to-5. You’re not hunting for glory here. Your job is to get in, do what needs done, and get out. And based on what I played at Gamescom, this could be a job I could grow to love.
That working man mentality undergirds most of what Exterminauts is about. You’re not wearing armor; you’re clad in an orange worksuit you might see at a job site. You’re not going to be able to run off and do everything alone. You’ve gotta stick with your teammates if you want to get the job done, and you’ve got a boss in your ear telling you what you’ll need to take care of next. Oh, and while you may be on a far-off planet full of strange and wondrous flora and fauna, you’re still working for The Man, which is to say, interstellar megacorporations. The more things change, right? Exterminauts has been in development for about five years now, but when I asked members of the team about the game’s identity, they told me that blue collar identity was always part of what they wanted to make.
My demo consisted of a single three-man contract. After we’d chosen our pre-built characters (you’ll have access to customization in the full game, including weapon mods and passive abilities), it was time to get to work. Exterminauts has a low-key vibe to it. Yeah, you’re fighting some absolutely otherworldly monsters (I really liked what looked like air jellyfish, and another bug-like creature) with giant pincers, but everything is very bright, vivid, and colorful. This looks like an alien world full of alien creatures that can fly when you least expect it, burrow underground, and genuinely feel, well, alien – something that’s often hard for games to pull off.
When I asked about it, Creative Director Vincent Regimbald told me nailing that was a lot of work. “I think one of the things that we went for initially was just to try to look at shapes that were really interesting. One of the enemies that you did not see is the wrecking slug. We thought of a Kinder surprise or an egg of sorts. Basically it just rolls around like a big boulder and every now and then it just opens up and there’s almost like a yoke inside. It’s really gross and that’s the weak spot that you shoot at and then it closes back up and starts rolling again. So it’s that nice contrast between something that looks incredibly tough and hard and threatening as it’s just coming at you, but then on the inside just kind of soft and mushy and really weak. So we always think about our enemies in that way to try to go against expectations a little bit and just try to surprise the audience.”
Thankfully, we were more than equipped for the job. My character occupied more of a support role in my play session. My machine gun was great for smaller fauna, but I also had a deployable turret. My favorite, though, was my rocket launcher, which exploded with cacophonous booms and wiped out anything unlucky enough to be near the blast radius. Extrerminauts also does a neat thing where you can use your backpack to overcharge your heavy weapons, making them even stronger. When something absolutely, positively has to die, accept no substitutes.
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