When it comes to teaming players up together to take on hordes of enemies, developers are starting to branch out on what type of enemies to use. While the logical choice to follow up with the somewhat overused zombie aspect would be dinosaurs, Systemic Reaction decided that they simply wouldn’t be tough enough. Thus, we have been given Second Extinction - a game full of tasks to complete while facing off against mutant dinosaur hordes!
Gameplay
Team up with up to two other players to form a trio of fighters sent out to complete a handful of objectives. There are multiple characters to choose from and each one uses their own special weapons and has their own specific aids as well. This makes the character choice a unique part of the game and will change how you fight off the dinosaurs. They have a character for snipers, machine gunners, and more, but most characters have the option to bring in a rocket or grenade launcher instead of for their main weapon. This isn’t completely necessary, but definitely helpful when unable to form a full 3-man squad.
You can choose to do a story mission or an expedition when it comes to the gameplay. Either way, you are thrown into the same map and given the open-world freedom of exploration. The mission choice will just change your main objective of that particular drop. While story missions will have a specific main task, choosing to do an expedition is basically a “do whatever you want” option. There are side missions around the map at all times and you would basically be just setting out to do a bunch of those on an expedition, but are welcome to do them during story missions as well.
When you finish missions, you do get experience and level up, which will unlock more options for your characters. Once you level up enough, you unlock the option to accept contracts. These contracts are basically side tasks to earn a little extra reward. Honestly, they aren’t very rewarding as far as I have seen, but I imagine they will end up having contracts with high rewards at the cost of being more difficult to complete. As it stands, you can choose up to 3 contracts at one time and the majority of them are easy to do by just completing missions and even completing all of them at once.
While out in the field, you will collect some items that will seem useless at first. It turns out these items are used to help upgrade your weapons though. You will need a variety of different items and earned points in order to upgrade your gear. Plan out what you want to upgrade as well because you will have a limited amount of points to use, even once you unlock all of the usable points. They can at least be removed to be placed in different parts, so your upgrades aren’t permanent, which gives room for creative changes.
The fighting itself is pretty high intensity as it is very easy to be overrun. Some dinosaurs can simply be shot, but there are bigger enemies that will require special handling to take them down. The game does a great job making sure you know what to do for each dinosaur as the characters will usually say it, plus the weak points are a weird blue marking (or substance?) on the dinosaur. For instance, the T-rex is weak in the neck. But note that the hardest part of the mission, regardless of what you have been through, is during extraction because you basically have to survive a nonstop onslaught of enemies as you have to stay within a small radius. As a player that uses the sniper character a lot, I like to save my aid attack for this moment because my character brings down a large beam attack that I can move. Basically, I get a 10-second eradicator attack to clear the area when everybody needs a couple of seconds to restock and reload.
Expectations
Currently, the max level is 25. I can only imagine they will end up expanding on this to at least 50 if not 100. More levels mean more unlockables which also means more development is needed, so it is understandable to have a growing level cap during early access.
While there are already a handful of side tasks and dinosaur types, I also imagine they will expand further on both of these aspects in the game. Again, variety does take more development, but having a ton of the same handful of options gets repetitive and part of what makes fighting games entertaining is the constant change and unknowing of what to expect.
I also hope they put in some sort of system to make it easier to team up with random players. I didn’t see any type of queueing system and found myself relying on finding players through discord. They also need to add cross-play so that players on Steam and Xbox can play without an issue either.
Conclusion
Second Extinction is a fantastic multiplayer horde fighter title! I really enjoy playing this game with others and think it will take some serious skill to take a mission solo. They do a good job balancing the co-op aspect with the difficulty and keeping it to where you aren’t facing more than what could be considered a fair amount of enemies. It is both entertaining and frustrating, which is what I would expect from a horde survival game. I love to see this genre reach the dinosaur era and look forward to seeing where they take this title in the future!
