REVIEW – I’m writing this review for the fourth time, and with it, I’ve spent more time on it than completing Extinction. It already should give you the basic idea of the next few thousand characters, and then I didn’t even go into how badly planned this game is: the good ideas are quickly overrun by massive repetition.

 

We barely heard of Iron Galaxy Studios until now: after their 2012 X360 arcade title Wreckateer, they had an okay fighting game in 2013 (Divekick – PC, X1, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita). Then, they were silent while making the PC/X1 Killer Instinct. The silence is now broken, and I wish they would have kept their silence.

Attack on the Titan’s ass

The concept of the game reminds me of Shadow of the Colossus and Attack on Titan: a human fights giants, which are called Ravenii here I think. The game starts nicely with its opening cutscene video, but I’m not joking when I say that the rest of the game falls on its face flat shortly after that.

I mean, during the thirty-four missions, you will have a whopping amount of four mission types. Kill X Raveniis, kill X Jackals (which is the smaller, easy-to-kill enemy… and there’s another type called Vulture, and that’s it), protect the watchtower for X minutes, and save X civilians. That’s all! These four mission types keep rotating around in Extinction, which can be completed in roughly 6- hours. Sure, you can get some bonuses by completing some random secondary missions (one of which includes the hard to complete DO NOT DIE task…), and you can level up your skills, but I can easily say that the most expensive one, which allows you to wallrun, can’t be unlocked on your first playthrough, and I’m fairly sure that you wouldn’t replay the game again, so Iron Galaxy‘s idea failed… miserably.

Shadow of the Shadow of the Colossus

The game’s lack of proper planning shows more than in the lack of mission types, maybe except for the story (although the ending video is ridiculously short). The Raveniis attack the Earth, then you, Avil, the last Sentinel, along with your sidekick, Xandra, try to make the king called Yarrow to build a teleport and evacuate the people. I’m not going to spoil the twists, though.

The Raveniis can be killed by backstabbing them with those rune slashes (which requires a meter, of course). For that to happen, you have to chop off their limbs, which regenerate, and I have to say that the game can be quite buggy here, as I have seen myself getting killed by just a simple roar, I’ve seen ONE-LEGGED Raveniis spawn, and I’ve also seen three of them spawn in complete armor, too.

Oh yeah, armor types: from wooden to metal, they might need more hits, and this is Extinction‘s way to shake things up. The whole experience gets ruined by the lack of a lock-on button, and I have to point to the repetition once again because the game gets boring quickly despite leveling up your character’s skills. Climbing onto the Raveniis and the camera can be annoying, or even downright terrible, and I have to ask why the devs were not able to program a grab button, so I could have at least tried to stay on a Ravenii after I clung onto a building or a tree for god knows how long?

Extinction of your money

The game’s visuals are far from enjoyable: they aren’t bad but they aren’t beautiful either. The cartoonish cutscenes become barely animated scenes, I don’t even remember the music, and in general, I have to say that Extinction feels like an unfinished third-person action game. The missions are timed, and if you have to save the civilians, I’m sure you will not care about anything else and be done with that mission in just two minutes.

But wait! That’s not even the joke yet! The joke is that Extinction costs sixty dollars. The same price as God of War. This game is more like a twenty-dollar fare, not a sixty-buck experience. I’d rather throw an extra tenner in and buy the Digital Deluxe version of God of War on the PlayStation Store (I couldn’t find the vanilla one, lol) and have fun with that instead of suffering from this piece of shit. What were the devs thinking?

Why should I kill these orcs? I’d rather get Shadow of the Colossus instead, and that costs pretty much half of Extinction’s price, and that wouldn’t be completed in one day either. The reason why I give it a 4/10 is that it got my attention… initially. Extinction is one of the major flops of the year, and I’m not surprised to see that it’s published by Maximum Games, who failed quite hard last year with Road Rage. Congratulations!

-V-

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Publisher: Maximum Games

Developer: Iron Galaxy Studios

Genre: Adventure, action

Release date: April 10, 2018