Do you ever hear a title and immediately go: "That's a video game", that was me when I heard about this one. It's almost comical how prototypical of a naming convention this game has, to the point where is sounds like a parody videogame you'd see on a sitcom or something. It's that perfect mix between exaggeration and word jumble that is supposed to sound cool. And at this point I've already spent decidedly too long talking purely about the title of this game without getting into what this game is actually about. And I may just blame that on the plain fact that I have practically nothing to say about this game which lands in the realm of positivity, but let's dive in all the same.
As soon as the trailer started there was a very specific mood that was set around the chat. We saw our first person perspective as we dropped out of the sky with guns and armies of swarming dinosaurs, so of course the first thing that people thought was 'Halo with Dinosaurs'. Now of course one could argue that Halo already has dinosaurs in it but I don't want to annoy that fanbase too much so I'll rather point out the fact that there's already a well known series about murdering dinosaurs in first person; and it's Turok. I wasn't the only person in the chat to go "Huh? Turok remake? How exciting!" But as the trailer dragged on it became more abundantly clear that this wasn't the case. The weapons were too pedestrian, the gunplay too 'industry-standard' and the general vibe just a shade too serious for the almost-arcadey feel of old-school Turok. So either this was another failed reboot attempt or another game altogether. (We got the latter.)
'Second Extinction: Reclaim Earth' is, if nothing else, a pretty self explanatory premise due to the title alone. There was some sort of event which caused the dinosaurs to grow out of control and run rampant on modern day Earth (Cue the Jeff Goldblum scene) and the player is now tasked with 'containing them' in a hail of bullets with 3 player co-op and some gunplay that looks like it was borrowed from Far Cry. In terms of premise, this actually appears to be frighteningly threadbare, and that's not an assessment that I make based on the trailer alone. I've combed through the steam and even the official website, and all I can see is the same tag; 'Earth is taken over, this is a 3 player co-op game'. Ultimately this has led me to believe that this game has no story and was designed to slide into that niche multiplayer PVE shooter genre that seems to have been stirred by titles like GTFO.
For the unfamiliar; GTFO is a four person survival horror FPS game which directs the bulk of it's development efforts into providing a challenging experience that can only really be handled as a group. GTFO doesn't acheive this by forcing character classes or anything upon it's players, but rather by making challenging hazards for the players to face whilst granting each player a limited pool of carry slots, making 'builds' amount to the dynamic playstyles of each player. I see shades of this in 'Second Extinction', although it's hard to really say for sure when practically nothing concrete about the game is really out there yet. (Maybe they played this one just a little bit too close to the chest, I dunno.)
If there's one little nagging thing that does throw me off in regard to this title it's the whole 'three player co-op' thing. What's that about? I mean, maybe I sound like an out-of-touch dummy by hamming in on this particular point but why exactly isn't there four players like literally every other co-op game in existence? The only games that really insist upon the whole three-player approach are the pseudo-MMOs which get away with it because they can, in theory, host more than three players, but ever other gamer friend group has surely been forcibly morphed into a foursome by this point purely to accommodate for the trend in modern co-op, so isn't a three-player set-up going to leave someone high and dry? (Not a very clever move in my opinion)
As opposed to GTFO, however, Second Extinction does seem dead set on going the 'classes' route with it's introduction of three 'heroes' already. You'll have only seen them for a split second in the actual trailer, but they do have a presence on the official website. Unfortunately, at first glance I have to say that they look pretty much a generic and dull as your standard Call of Duty line-up, which strikes me as odd for a premise as wild as hunting dinosaurs! It seems like there's a disconnect between subject and presentation which isn't really vibing with me right now. One thing that Turok always nailed was the fact that it's premise was farcical which allowed for the gameplay to mimic that. You had cool strange weapons, cartoony violence and pick-up-play action; but I'm getting none of that self-awareness coming off of Second Extinction and that worries me.
I know that I admonished Scarlet Nexus for being a little cookie cutter, but at least I admitted there were shimmers of cool action in that game, whereas I cannot quite say the same here. Gunplay looks literally identical to what I've seen in every other FPS to date and nothing grabs me. The flavour text teases 'mutant dinosaurs' but even they didn't stand out, and if the site is any indication I think I know why. Acid Raptors? Electric Raptors? Is that really the extent of the team's creativity when poised with the prospect of mutant dinosaurs? They just browsed their way down the table of elements? Why not have T-Rex with wings or an Omegalodon with tentacles that floats out of the water? Why not go really crazy with things? I'm not sure, but the result of keeping things vaguely grounded is a largely generic looking game.
Of course, credit where credit is due, the vistas and backgrounds do look lovely throughout this trailer, but sightseeing hardly seems like the focus of this game. Yeah, the Series X can run some high-definition textures, I get it, but what about ascendant gameplay concepts, can I get a bit of that? It'll likely be a couple of years before we really get an idea for what this new console is capable of, and until then there'll be a lot more of these meh ideas for games that look like they could have done with a few more hours in the oven before being presented to the public. Sorry Avalanche, this doesn't do it for me.
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