Roar! Primal Carnage: Extinction Leaves Early Access
Sounds not quite ready
My new favourite demonstration of the subjectivity of reviews is Primal Carnage: Extinction [official site]. The dinosaur-hunting multiplayer FPS reached version 1.0 and left Early Access last week, and I've had a bit of a nose round its Steam user reviews. One highly-rated review complains that as well as Extinction not being much of an upgrade over its predecessor, most servers are on Free Roam mode: "A game mode where literally nothing happens and players just troll and walk around."
Which sounds totally tubular. Heck yeah I want to chill out as a big ole dinosaur!
Of course, I didn't buy the game with the express goal of shooting dinosaurs/eating men, so I suppose my reaction might be a mite different. If I had paid £14.99, I might be less jazzed about bugs and everyone hanging with their dinobuds. Especially given that Extinction was originally supposed to be a free update.
Extinction began life as a the long-promise "recode" of Primal Carnage, which was to fix old, old problems that'd long held the game back. Then it became a separate, standalone game that Primal Carnage players would need to pay for. They get a discount, sure, but it's still a bummer.
Though it's now out of Early Access, patches are still coming quickly, with notes including changes like "Disabled lag compensation until it can be improved." Wonky netcode sounds fairly bad for an online multiplayer FPS, really.
However, if you do want to hang out with in 3D dinochat - and gripes about the server mode ratio would suggest a fair number of people do - Primal Carnage: Extinction is £14.99 on Steam.
