Exoprimal’s Savage Gauntlet endgame content loses sight of what makes the base game fun

I’ve been loving Capcom’s PVE/PVP dinosaur-slaying race game Exoprimal since it came out. Never intending to write a review for the game, I fell in love with Exoprimal’s battle loop and sci-fi weirdness, and ended up fully committing to the completion of the campaign so I could write about how much I loved it. I had an absolute blast with the game, particularly the way the story changes throughout the campaign manifest in the mission structure.

I’ve still been dipping in and out of the game in the days since, but mostly I’ve been eagerly awaiting Capcom’s drop of the Exoprimal’s first “endgame content”, entitled “Savage Gauntlet”. The results are…not worth the wait.

I’m not saying that Savage Gauntlet is bad, per se, I’m just saying that the mode is super short, and it kinda loses sight of the elements of Exoprimal that make it fun and unique. Savage Gauntlet pits teams of five against a brief series of extremely difficult dinosaur battles, and asks them to complete the stages as quickly as possible. The bummer of it is that you are no longer competing against other teams; you are instead asked to score as highly as you can on a world leader board (which I totally could not find in-game). This takes a lot of the fun and tension out of the activity, as racing against the other team (or fighting them, or working with them) is what makes Exoprimal so darned fun.

I ended up running through Savage Gauntlet twice with two teams of randos (you can see this in the video below). The first barely scraped by under the ten-minute time cap, but the second group acquitted ourselves quite nicely, finishing the run in just over five minutes. The mode has three phases, which involve some pretty hardy helpings of dinosaurs dropped on your head, capping things off with a two T-Rex, one Stego combo platter. It is not easy, but it is very short and kind of anticlimactic when you beat it.

Players defeating Savage Gauntlet don’t get nearly as much XP as they do from running a regular mission, so even that is kind of a bummer. There is a vague promise of “unique rewards” being offered for beating the mode under certain unspecified timeframes, but all I could find was a few new award emblems that I could add to my character profile, and who gives a crap about that? I mean, I certainly don’t care enough to keep trying to increase my score. I find the base mode of Exoprimal so much more fun, tense, and gripping.

So, while I will continue to check out Savage Gauntlets as they drop (they come out every Thursday and run for a few days), I’m not going to spend any time on them after beating them a few times. I’m just going back to my Witch Doctor battle pass grind, and when that is done, I’ll be waiting for the new Exosuit variants to drop in August. I guess you can’t win them all.