Full disclosure: I did not get to play Exodus with the grumpy mecha octopus sniper. “Where’s the octopus sniper?”, I whispered, confusion melting into sadness as the two other members of my space station infiltration team stepped forward under the support of their dull, seen-it-all-before vertebrae. No, it’s fine. It’s fine.
I’d like to say that the demo’s shooting and roleplaying moments made up for the lack of squidmates. In some places, particularly when venturing back out into the vacuum, it actually did. But if Exodus really is going to occupy the Guns & Conversation space that Mass Effect is currently leaving vacant, I’d hope it’s holding much more in reserve, as the corridor battles and bland heroes I saw probably aren’t going to cut it.
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I can’t disagree with Edwin, for one thing, that playable character Jun Aslan is as Medium-sliced a bag of Hovis Soft White as protagonists come. His (I played the dude version) most interesting characteristic is a passing resemblance to The Room’s Greg Sestero, and whereas both his human companions express themselves through respectively sinister and rambunctious enthusiasm for battle, Jun defaults to flat deliveries of unremarkable hero-speak. “No one deserves that level of cruelty,” he declares of some enslaved talking frogs, to a room full of people who already agree with him. “They’re sentient being who deserve to live in peace,” he adds, presumably while his finger instinctively twitches towards his phone keyboard’s sad face emoji.
Once the frogs themselves show up, they too converse either unconvincingly or unentertainingly, having had the misfortune to evolve a vocabulary of casual hey-man Americanisms. Exodus’ concept of substituting aliens for “awakened” Earth species remains quite a neat one, but as with Starfield’s grey rocks, there’s a sense so far that it could have done anything with its science fiction – yet chooses the familiar.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
There’s a big risk of proving true of the action as well. The powers-aided gunplay is functional, and I did wholeheatedly enjoy the power that bursts a strip of jagged rocks up from the ground, launching lighter enemies up into the space rafters. Otherwise, though, most fights played out as rote shootouts against repeating combinations of ranged and melee enemies, only sometimes punctuated by a bullet-spongey mech. Its ‘catalyst’ system of setting up and activating elemental effects is basically a rebranded prime/detonate from the Mass Effects, and while I’m aware defending the most recent entry is grounds for a tarring, nothing I played had the dynamism of Andromeda’s jetpack movement.
The power wheel, which you can bring up to demand an underling’s rocket barrage or cloaked backstab, also had a nasty habit of locking onto the wrong target. Not a huge issue when laying an ambush, but eye-wideningly maddening when a clawed cultist is half an arm swing from opening your neck and the menu is more concerned with some reloading grunt half a mile down the hall.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
Even with these missteps and missed opportunities, however, Exodus does have one secret technique left: taking all the air away. By however many lightyears a country mile is, the best parts of this demo were those where Jun and the gang stepped outside for some zero-G gunfighting. The accompanying, Dead Space-ian audio alterations instantly heighten the – for want of a better word – atmosphere, friendly and enemy fire alike replaced by your character’s quiet, isolated breaths, and even your own shots are reduced to an eerily distant thud. The non-diagetics are even better, the soundtrack adapting to the change in environment: unleashing that ground spike power, unlike in ‘normal’ fights, triggers a gorgeously ethereal synth riff, adding a musical flourish to the otherwise near-silent action. And I literally stopped playing for a moment to appreciate how, in the final attack of an encounter, my battlesuited companion Elise fired a single rocket that flew to the sound of a rising crescendo before exploding, musically and shrapnel-ly, in climax.
I mean… god damn. That was fucking rad. And a showcase of the flavour and creativity that Exodus, now-bafflingly, seems to be lacking elsewhere.
Image credit: Wizards of the Coast
The optimistic view could be that this was simply a poorly-chosen 45 minutes to use as a vertical slice, with the game’s latter hours providing more uniqueness; I’m sure there won’t be huge chunks of Exodus spent in microgravity, but these segments did suggest that developers Archetype Entertainment are capable of greater things. And, frankly, it would be nice to have an ME-like without the generative AI and alleged pro-war baggage of Owlcat’s The Expanse: Osiris Reborn.
The alternative is that Exodus really is a grey, unambitious decision-o-shooter that doesn’t develop its best ideas. Which, now that I’ve tasted at least one of them, would be even more of a letdown than being denied an octopus pal.