You may or may not have heard of Extinction. It’s a game that recently dropped on Steam, and it looks fantastic. I mean, who wouldn’t want to defend a town against hordes of rampaging orc-like Ravenii? Not to mention climbing up huge 8-10 story tall Ravenii, shattering their armor bit by bit, and then eviscerating them, detaching limb after limb until a final, gratifying decapitation. Sounds great, right? Well, the folks over at Iron Galaxy (makers of Divekick and the most recent Killer Instinct game) sure thought so when they developed Extinction. But hey, when you’re locked in a room full of cubicles, a lot of things seem like a good idea without some outside perspective, right?
The story behind Extinction is woefully thin. Basically monsters called Ravenii (which are essentially a vast tide of orcs) are attacking towns. You play Avil, one of the last Sentinels. There’s no reason why you’re the last Sentinel or what happened to all of your brethren though. Odd, considering how ridiculously more powerful you are than basically every other human in existence. You apparently complement a girl/woman (it’s hard to tell) named Xandra who tells the initial team-up story and blathers endlessly in your ear. You break away from some work camp and proceed to slaughter the Ravenii and save a bunch of villagers. Oddly, they’re all called civilians, not peasants, even though this is a feudal kingdom and not a military action by the US Army. You save a bunch of people, kills some orcs, and then get the attention of the smarmy king, who orders you around like an indentured servant trying to avoid debtor’s prison, even though you’re apparently the only person capable of fighting off even the weakest of these monsters. By Chapter 2, you’ll find yourself skipping the story rampantly, and by Chapter 3, likely the animated cinema sequences too because the story is so weak.
You’re probably not all that excited for Extinction right now, but let’s continue anyway. The graphics are…okay. They’re certainly nothing to compare to a game like Vermintide II or any other top-tier title. They do have a charming cel-shaded look to them, which is respectable. It’s quite reminiscent of Rare titles more than anything else, and that’s not a bad thing. In addition the environments are extremely destructible, though mostly by the enemies. Interestingly, you can run through fences like they’re wet grass for some reason….strong thighs perhaps? The cartoon motif continues into the dialogue and cinemas as well as the gameplay. The texture mapping is passable but nothing special. All in all, Extinction looks like it could easily have been made around 5-8 years ago, even set on Ultra across the board. It’s nothing special, but it does run smoothly for the most part and doesn’t seem to glitch or crash. As you move, you’ll notice that buildings don’t cleanly become clear in the distance when you run towards them. Instead, there’s a cap on the clean draw distance that’s painfully visible, almost like a fog of war. Painful, but you’re mostly focused on the foreground for the duration of each level. Smaller enemies are also sadly lacking in detail and only the giant Ravenii are noticeably decent-looking.
But graphics and story don’t make a game, right? There’s also gameplay. And that’s where Extinction really shines. Or it would, if Iron Galaxy hadn’t failed at this too. Gameplay is extremely straightforward. Follow the instructions, don’t let the town get completely destroyed, and whatever you do, don’t play Extinction with a mouse and keyboard! Seriously. The game is painfully clunky with a standard PC mouse and keyboard setup and quite obviously designed from the ground up for a controller. It doesn’t give any warning or suggestion in the beginning though. An initial playthrough with a solid mechanical keyboard and mouse will have you cringing. It is highly recommended that you use a controller. For this review, that was a Microsoft Xbox One controller, and the difference was night and day. The game automatically detected the controller and switched all prompts instantly to controller based ones, so there’s that at least. Unfortunately, it’s one of the only redeeming gameplay qualities.
As you play through each level, Xandra will give you story and instructions, irritatingly pausing the gameplay mid-swing to do so. This tends to get you hit or killed. On top of that, your goal is to rescue civilians, which consists of running up to a bunch of civilians who stand helplessly around a bunch of crystals while monsters come and slaughter them. They don’t run or defend themselves at all. To save them, you run up to the crystal, kill the monsters and then hold Y until a charge bar fills and the game flashes that you’ve ‘saved’ the civilians. Fun. Very immersive. And that’s the issue with the gameplay. It’s not immersive in any way. It’s tedious, often drags you visibly away from the game for story and notifications, and just isn’t fun. Sure you can slash stuff in slow motion, bounce off anything, and unrealistically run up the side of buildings like The Flash, but even when you’re fighting the giant Ravenii, you simply do the same thing over and over again. Levels are procedurally generated and even many of the level goals are random and chosen via a visible roulette wheel, wildly detracting from the story.
By the time you get through Chapter 2, you’ll have seen most of what the game has to offer. After that, it’s minor tweaks to the monsters to make them harder to kill or more irritating, but nothing really changes. You just fight through random town after random town, mashing the A button and jumping about hacking off giant limbs. You scrounge up points for upgrades to make the killing easier and whatnot, but there’s no real magic or interest to it like there is to the skill progression tree of games like Skyrim or Dragon Age: Inquisition. Why there’s even a skill tree to begin with is vexing, because it ruins the flow of an action game like Extinction, as do the story elements and constant reminders of your goals onscreen in text. Ultimately, there’s maybe a good 2-3 hours in this game to really see anything, and after that, you’re just putting mileage on your controller for no reason. There’s not even a solid soundtrack for the game, it’s just plodding and generic, like everything else you’ll see. At least Iron Galaxy could have licensed some decent music like “Destroy the Orcs” by Three Inches of Blood. It might get the blood pumping. A metal soundtrack certainly would have been more welcome than the tepid pap that runs endlessly in the background.
That’s really the issue with Extinction. It’s a game of almosts. It almost has a decent story concept. It almost manages decent graphics without managing to stand out in any way. It almost manages some moderately unique gameplay. Climbing up giant Ravenii is neat, but it’s basically the whole game, and it’s already been done much better in Attack on Titan 2 and Shadow of the Colossus. Nothing is new or innovative. Extinction is quite simply almost fun. But ultimately it isn’t fun, it isn’t great, it isn’t memorable, and it certainly isn’t worth the spectacular $60.00 ($75 Cdn) price tag that comes with the regular version of the game and the even more daunting $70 ($85 Cdn) for the Deluxe Edition which comes with an extra trial and a season pass. Yeah, there’s also a Daily Challenge, an Extinction Mode where you fight waves of baddies, and a Skirmish mode, but why bother? That’s basically the main game anyway. This is a game that would have been fun for a few hours if it was $20 or less, but at $60.00, it’s downright offensive. If you just want to hack apart giant faux orcs and smash some buildings with a painful plot, then this is the game for you. If you’re expecting a AAA title with deep story, replayability, and any sort of gratification, it’s definitely time to move on. Certainly a mediocre effort at best by Iron Galaxy, and if they don’t go out of business, let’s hope they learn from this hackneyed and patchwork mess of a game for next time.
A free Beta version of Extinction for PC was provided for the purposes of this review. The PC hardware used in this review was an I7 8700k processor with a Asus GTX 1080 ROG Strix graphics card and 16 GB DDR4 3000 RAM. Some screenshots used in this review were taken from the media page for Extinction here.