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I was sitting at the airport waiting for my boarding group to be called when it dawned on me what a distinctly odd moment in time I was living through. I was flying to a preview event for an extraction shooter called Exoborne, all the while checking my phone to see if there were any updates on whether my friends and family in Los Angeles were okay, if they had to evacuate, if they still had homes. The game is set in a post-apocalyptic United States, one where the disaster that ruined our world wasn’t nuclear war, or zombies, or a pandemic. It was climate change.
Mother Nature had even more of a helping hand in this particular version of our doomed future than she’s getting in real life—which, unfortunately for us, is really saying something. A corporation called Project Rebirth was supposed to save the world from climate disaster with geoengineering technology, but instead weaponized it and turned it against the people. We play as Reborn, who are mostly regular folks who have taken up arms to battle against the corporation while trying to scavenge a life from the wreckage.
We do this with the help of Exo-Rigs, which are exoskeletons that give us access to heroic powers. Every suit has a grappling hook and a Breath of the Wild-style glider, as well as additional bells and whistles according to its type. The Kodiak is tanky but slow, the Kestrel can float and shoot in midair for a short time, and the Viper has a deadly backstabbing blade. The rigs and your guns can be kitted out with all sorts of attachments, some that you might find in other shooters (mags, scopes, grenades) and some that are bespoke to this world (scanners that pierce heavy fog, electronics to hack Rebirth technology, airstrikes when the weather doesn’t preclude flying).
Scrappy, post-apocalyptic extraction means picking your kit from stuff you’ve accumulated, dropping in, grabbing what you can, and getting out. Complicating matters is all sorts of stuff that wants to kill you. Other players. Really angry trailer park residents. Killer robots. The weather.
I mention the weather again because it’s a huge part of what makes Exoborne special. You’ll run into swarms of tornadoes, heavy fog, drenching rain, and all kinds of other unpleasantness, all of which affect the battlefield. In fact, basically every major memorable moment I had from the preview came from the environmental effects in one way or another.
One time I was late to the extraction point, running way behind my squad (you can drop in with up to three players), probably because I had my nose poked in some container like a raccoon trying to figure out how to jam one more Big Boss hot sauce into my pack. As I rushed to the exfil the weather changed from mostly sunny and clear to stormy and windy, something I very much did not clock as I went to double jump over a rock just in front of the evac ship. My glider deployed, I shot straight into the air on an updraft and got buzzed in half by the rotors.
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Another time I was caught in a pitched firefight and went down. I had a self-revive kit I’d found in a crate earlier, but there was no way I was going to have time to deploy it before an opposing player finished me off. But just as they ran up to deliver the kill shot, a tornado scooped me up like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz and deposited me a few hundred feet away. I popped my kit, got back on my feet, and was back in the action a minute later.
This is first and foremost an online PVP game, and we know a lot of people who play those games aren’t necessarily interested in story, but everyone benefits from context.
Martin Hultberg, narrative director
These emergent moments and some added spice from the powerful Exo-Rigs elevated Exoborne’s shooting and made my time with the game a delight. The three increasingly tough maps I tried were chock-a-block with interesting locations and stuff to interact with, the NPC enemies ranged from hopeless mooks to terrifying deathbots, and combat with other players had that same anxious pressure you’ll recognize from other games in the space.
One thing that really impressed me was the commitment to setting and narrative. I expected technical excellence from the team that made The Division (Sharkmob was founded by longtime Massive Entertainment folks, and they made 2021’s Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodhunt, which we loved even if it didn’t end up being a huge hit). What I didn’t expect was to have an extraction shooter where I genuinely wanted to know what was going on in the story, filled with excellent voice acting and absolutely gut-punching cutscenes.
We only got a little taste at the event, but it’s clear that they’re interested in telling a story here, even if it’s one where we don’t get all the answers. I spoke to one of the co-founders of Sharkmob, Martin Hultberg, who also serves as narrative director for Exoborne, and he said it’s more of “an explorative collaborative narrative where we want players to be able to find clues, discuss things, try and come up with what really happened.” You’ll get story beats in the form of cutscenes and assignment briefings, but also from environmental storytelling, collectibles, and hints from NPCs.
This is just the kind of thing that might get me to stick with a game like Exoborne longer than I might normally. I find myself bouncing off shooters relatively quickly, especially really techy ones like Escape from Tarkov, and “story” in other competitive games like Overwatch often amounts to character lore with no actual bearing on the combat and no feeling that there’s anything at stake. If they weave in some decent storytelling with all the missions to loot stuff and kill NPCs and use certain guns, something like what Destiny managed, Exoborne might stick to my ribs a bit better.
Hultberg was quick to point out that they’re aware that your archetypal extraction shooter enjoyer might not be the perfect audience for an involved story. “This is first and foremost an online PVP game, and we know a lot of people who play those games aren’t necessarily interested in story, but everyone benefits from context,” he said. “Everyone is immersed through context, even if they don’t care about the characters and the motivations they have.” He told me that if that’s not your thing, if you’re a mash-the-button-through-the-talking gamer “and you just wanna be immersed in a world, have a good time, kill people in a tornado and take their shit, you can still do that!”
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We had some bugginess around matchmaking and loading into maps, signs that what I played of Exborne was still an early build. The Exos all felt kinda samey and I’d love to see Sharkmob do more to make them feel really distinct from one another—more like Warframe’s Warframes, or Destiny’s classes. Reloading felt kinda loose, and I often found myself clicking with an empty mag because I’d inadvertently canceled my reload mid-animation.
Live service games are always a bit of a gamble, but these developers have enough of a pedigree that hopefully we won’t have another Concord or Suicide Squad on our hands. And with the very real threat of climate disaster weighing heavily on my mind, it’s encouraging to see a game helping nudge our collective attention in that direction. Hopefully Exoborne will be one small step toward us all finding a way to prevent our actual planet from being consumed by fiery tornadoes.
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Kurt Indovina
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