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.
But despite its name, Exterminauts isn’t just about blasting away at whatever we found planetside. You also have to do your job. That means traipsing up (or ziplining between) massive structures and doing things like turning valves, fixing electrical shorts, welding metal, or whatever else. One of my favorite sections had me playing what was essentially the pipe connecting minigame from Bioshock while my turret (and my squadmates) held off some local wildlife that really didn’t want us around.
But some problems will require multiple Exterminauts to fix, so you’ll have to coordinate, which was one of my favorite things about my time with it. Even something as simple as turning a pair of valves at the same time can be challenging when you only have one person left to defend the rest of the team. I also dug that you could fasttrack some of these fixes if you were willing to give something up. Sure, I could play the minigame to get that terminal back online, but I could also just juice it with my backpack if I had the power to spare.
“We looked at a lot of the typical things that a blue-collar worker might do on a work site,” Regimbald told me when I asked about how they approached designing the jobs players would need to do. “So we only saw a portion here, but there is welding, there are terminals that are shut down that need to be rebooted. There’s electrical systems that are offline that need to be rebooted. So it’s a lot of interaction points.”
I also liked how Exterminauts makes you traverse its world. Things aren’t flat; the buildings you’ll climb and the environments you’ll navigate are replete with gorges and cliffs you’ll need ziplines to navigate. Or you could, like me, just slide off the smaller ones and hope you could time a roll as you were about to land to mitigate the fall damage. Half the time, the first part of any job was asking, “Okay, how do we get up there?”
Once we’d finished rebooting all the terminals, fixing welds, dropping in new pipe, and clearing off weird goop that had accumulated on the machines we needed to maintain, it was time to go home. No job is done until you clock out, after all – and you do literally clock in and out in Exterminauts. Once we called in a dropship to take us home, it was time to hold out until it arrived. My turret put in work, but at this point I figured I’d juice up my rocket launcher and play around with it a bit. It worked great, but I also accidentally killed a couple of my teammates – and if you run out of lives, it’s contract failed. Whoops.
And that’s the other thing about Exterminauts, and something that you might not get from watching a trailer: it’s chaotic. Whether you’re blowing your friends up by accident or getting knocked off of a tall structure you’re trying to fix or just reacting to stuff going wrong on the fly, you’re always making decisions and dealing with something beyond your control, and according to the developers, that’s intentional. I felt it during my demo, and it’s one of the aspects of Exterminauts I enjoyed most.
Eventually, our dropship arrived and we made it off-planet and back to base. That was it. Demo over. I was sorry to see us clock out, but I am excited to see what kind of work I can pick up as an Exterminaut in the future. Oh, and those mods sound neat, too, especially the ice one that lets you freeze and shatter enemies. Until then, I’ll be workin’ 9-to-5, trying to make a living. Just like an Exterminaut, but without the aliens and scary falls. But you know what they say: any job you can walk away from is a good one, right?
While you’re here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we’ve checked out recently!
Will Borger
Will Borger is an IGN freelancer. You can find him on Bluesky @edgarallanbro.
