Extinction Review - Slaying a Giant Doesn't Seem That Fun

Extinction has you battle against giants in what look to be spectacular battles, but is it fun overall?

The game includes a campaign that has you go up against the Ravenii. A savage group of ogre like creatures that seem to want nothing but to destroy all of humanity. Standing in there way is Avill, a Sentinel, along with Xandra who take it upon themselves to stop them at any cost.

Along with this, there are several game modes such as Daily Challenge, Extinction and Skirmish. The Campaign is split in to seven chapters, each with their own missions to complete and this is further split into your main objective and side objectives that you can complete.

This usually includes saving civilians, defeating jackal or taking down the Ravenii. This unfortunately seems to suffer from quite a bit of repetition, so don't be surprised to be doing the same kind of mission a few times over. It also doesn't help when the environments these take place in don't change much themselves.

A lot of Extinction's gameplay takes place in an arena that consists of random buildings, watchtowers and more. These can be traversed to reach certain checkpoints and it does feel pretty fluid as Avil darts between buildings and bounces of trees and canopies. Once you get the hang of it, you'll find yourself moving around the space fairly quickly.

The Jackals are the smaller ogres that pop up on the map and while there are a variation of them, the main principle of defeating them stays the same and so when it comes to looking at Extinction as a whole, the biggest draw are the battles against the Ravenii in both the gameplay and spectacle side of it.

The Ravenii are the giant ogres and are defeated by essentially slicing their heads off. This is done by first building up your meter to execute such an attack and removing the necessary armour the Ravenii will have on. Just like with the Jackals, there are a variation of these too, but once you defeat two to three of them, you will be able to take them all down.

I also found it slightly frustrating when it came to the controls as it some times didn't register an attack which is especially important when a giant is just about to swing at you and pretty much wreck all your life in one hit.

This is most notable when trying to break its armour by attacking the locks and exposing the skin underneath. It can also become quite messy when trying to scale the giant in order to finish it off. Sometimes you see your self getting stuck under its armpit or even the crotch which can make timed battles against multiple of them quite annoying.

There is also an extinction meter in the top right that goes down as the giants stomp around the map. Allowing this to reach zero will mean you have failed the mission. so being able to get around as well as you can is really helpful!

At the end of every mission you will get a medal depending on the objective you completed and skill points. Skill points allow you to unlock and upgrade Avil's abilities. You can gain abilities such as being able to rescue civilians faster and jump higher then usual.

On a side note I found saving the civilians to be quite odd as you can sometimes have several enemies around you therefore making it impossible to save them all. It also doesn't help that when transporting them to safety, it takes such a long time to charge.

Overall, Extinction is a game that fails to reach its true potential. Traversing these environments is a real joy, but the missions themselves can get quite repetitive after a while and fighting the giants can become incredibly frustrating when the controls aren't working correctly.

Perhaps if the controls were tightened up and there was a lot more variety to it, it would appeal to me much more, but if you want more out of the basic hack and slash, then maybe you should look elsewhere.

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