7 beginner tips for starting Exoprimal

How to beat down the dinos better

Capcom’s new team-based competitive shooter Exoprimal is out, and well, it’s a bit of an oddball. It’s got guns, mechs, and it’s all about whittling down the dino horde. And while it’s still early on in this game’s lifespan, we have a few tips for making life in Exoprimal easier.

Keep in mind, Exoprimal is a relatively full price ($59.99)  game, with additional progression and add-ons for extra cash. I don’t personally recommend dumping that kind of cash unless you just want to fast-track through the suits. Some of the early suits you get will tide you over well to the later ones, and most of Exoprimal is about efficiency in PvE, though you will have to fight a player from time to time. (It’s worth noting that Exoprimal is on Game Pass too, which makes a difference if you’re looking to save some cash while testing the waters.)

With that in mind, we’re keeping our tips oriented towards the basics: what little tips and bits of advice we’d give to a brand-new player, in order to get an edge over the other rookies.

Make sure to set your favorite suit

I’ve seen many players spawn into a match as Deadeye, the default Exosuit, and then start swapping around to others. Not only does this create confusion, as everyone tries to orient the team composition around the sudden swarm of Deadeyes, but it gets awkward when everyone swaps off, and then back, and then back again… It’s a hassle.

Head to the hangar and you can hit a special button (Square on PlayStation) to “favorite” a suit, making it the one you always spawn into a match as. Bam! No more awkward Deadeye conventions.

Check out your rig options

While you’re digging around in the Exosuit options, take a look at the rig options too. Rigs are a special piece of equipment, mounted on your shoulder, that can persist across suits. (Default button is Triangle on PlayStation.) You start out with a cannon, which is great for knocking Pteranodons out of the sky.

But, if you need some different options, there are some good ones you’ll unlock as you level up. The small healing field can be great for tanks that like to hunker down, like Krieger. Or the catapult option can help a melee-focused Exosuit like Zephyr get into the air, away from danger, or into the face of an enemy.

Equip some modules

One last thing to look at in the hangar is modules, and these are surprisingly important. Modules are pieces of equipment that you level up with BikCoin, the awkwardly named currency you accrue through matches and levelling up. After you open a module up in the hanger, you’ll need to spend BikCoin to enable it, and more to level it up.

These bonuses are worth it in a lot of ways. The universal ones offer some great buffs, like extra movement speed when your health is low. These little bits of help can make a tangible difference in the field. And that goes doubly-so for Exosuit-specific modules.

Main some suits to unlock specific modules

Some modules are designated just for their respective Exosuits, powering up their abilities. These range from helpful utility to extremely useful, amping up the skills and abilities of Exosuits to make them take down dinos even better.

You get these Exosuit-specific modules by levelling up the individual suit, which you can do by playing matches as said suit. Play the Exosuit you like, get things to make it better. Simple, right? If you want some direction, I particularly like Deadeye’s module that upgrades consecutive Ravager damage, as it helps the Soldier 76-esque character chew through larger, tougher enemies.

Don’t be afraid to switch it up

You might want to create a team composition and stick to it, but in my experience, it’s worth swapping out Exosuits if you feel a specific one just isn’t working. Exoprimal is surprisingly lenient in this regard, letting you get out of one Exosuit and into another in the middle of a match rather than waiting for a respawn or sticking it out.

Of course, this does mean playing as your lone pilot for a short moment, which can feel like an eternity if a wave of Raptors is bearing down on you. I recommend doing your swaps while waiting for some dinosaur portals to open at a Watcher’s waypoint. A helpful note: in my experience at least, it seems like you don’t lose charge on your ultimate ability when you swap suits. So feel free to mix it up!

Create chokepoints

If you’ve played any horde defense games before, you know all about good chokepoints. They’re a way to funnel the overwhelming numbers of the enemy down to a manageable size, and Exoprimal gives you some good methods for doing so. Walls, tank shields, and even the terrain itself all lend well to make concentrated areas of attack.

Clumping up enemies also helps you pull off some good combos, so if you notice your Roadblock is taunting and gathering up dinos, get ready with some AOE attacks. Working together is how you clear dinosaurs faster, and that’s one step closer to the next phase, and beating the enemy team.

It’s all about the data

If you wind up in the data cube PvP final mission, which involves escorting a data cube from one end of the map to the other, I’ll repeat what hundreds of Overwatch players have been screaming into their microphones since 2016: push the payload.

But seriously, the payload (data cube) of Exoprimal is pretty crucial. In addition to being your win condition, this payload is a bit more fragile than most; damage, from dinosaurs or enemy players, can temporarily halt its advance, forcing the team to hunker down and revive the data cube to progress forward.

There are other objective-based modes in Exoprimal too, some we’ve played and some we’ve only heard about from others digging into the game on day one. But the saying remains the same, whether Exoprimal, Overwatch, Battlefield, or anything else: play the objective. And if you’re an invading dinosaur, taking out the enemy payload can be a surprisingly helpful use of your limited Dominator time.