Extinction (2018) review

A large part of the time, fantasy video games tend to come only one or two varieties. You’re either in for a dungeon-crawling Diablo-style loot-em up or a sprawling narrative epic. A Torchlight or a Pillars of Eternity. A Dungeon Siege or a Divinity: Original Sin.

Sitting in contrast to the usual fare, Extinction strips things back a little and sits outside this dichotomy. It’s a straight-laced action game focused on moment-to-moment kinetics and the thrill of toppling giants.

Developed by Iron Galaxy, Extinction is a fantasy action game where you play a singular-but-exceptional swordsman who faces off against a legion of Kaiju-sized humanoid behemoths known as Ravenii.

Unfortunately, the final product here settles for the kind of mechanics, story and fantasy trapping you’ve probably seen before elsewhere. Extinction isn't without its moments – but it's shallow enough that saying those high are worth the putting the time in to see them is a tough ask.

The bigger they are

Right from the get-go, the comparisons to the popular anime Attack of Titan practically write themselves. However, if there’s anything that Extinction reminded me of, it’s the stories of Brandon Sanderson and – more specifically – the Stormlight Archive and Mistborn books.

Much like in the latter, Extinction finds the human race in pretty dire straits. Humanity is being invaded by stonking-big inter-dimensional ogres known as the Ravenii. You play as Avil, the Last Sentinel: a super-powered warrior tasked with taking down the gargantuan invaders.

It’s implied that the exact size of the Ravenii hordes is basically limitless, so your goal here isn’t to slaughter them all so much as it is buy the nearby people enough time to evacuate. This premise plays out again and again across the game’s 30-or-so level-long campaign.

Your focus will deviate from time to time, but generally each level of Extinction tasks you with either safely evacuating a certain number of citizens or executing a number of Ravenii. Sometimes, you're asked to protect a set of watchtowers – which are easily the weakest of the different objective-based levels in the game. \

In any case, these encounters take maybe 5-10 minutes apiece and take place across maps that randomly generated. That setup stays relatively fresh over the course of Extinction's campaign, though it didn't take particularly long for me to tire of the tile-set involved.

Completing mission objectives in Extinction will earn you points, which can then be spent on upgrades between missions. Unfortunately, the upgrade system here is a disappointingly linear one.

There’s not really any sort of skill tree or specialisation, just a set of boxes to be ticked that increase this or that aspect of Avil’s skill-set. You can give more health, letting him evacuate civilians faster, and let him jump that little bit higher if you put in the time. I was pretty disappointed with the lack of depth this system offered, although Extinction does start you off in a pretty powerful place to begin with.

There's no slow build-up. Instead, you're tasked with and given the tools needed to take down the Ravenii right from the get-go. Like the heroes in Sanderson’s stories, Avil dashes around the battlefield with superhuman finesse and fury. In line with that Sandersonian-style of action fantasy, you’re only really told what you need to know and everything comes with a funny/grandiose name attached.

They're not ogres. They're Ravenii. You're not a warrior. You're a Sentinel. The story here isn't without some turns but it rarely ever gets more complicated than stopping the bad guys.

If you’re looking for any tangible world-building beyond that, you’ll probably be disappointed with what Extinction has to offer. During and between levels, there’s some banter between Avil, Xandra and a few ancillary characters. These dialogue sequences often work in off-hand references to this place or that rival kingdom, but there’s rarely much time given to building up this setting and world in a way that feels all that well-realised. At least, within the game itself.

Between levels, there are also gorgeous animated cut-scenes that show how Avil and his protege Xandra met and give you a bit more background on their characters. These end up being the more compelling halve of the storytelling in Extinction. Though the details are largely glazed-over, you get a good sense of the broader arcs for the two characters.

These short-but-sweet sequences made me want to invest myself more in the game’s story and world far more than anything else. Frustratingly, there doesn't seem to be anywhere you can revisit them. If nothing else, they makes for a sharp contrast against the all-or-nothing tone and bare-bones storytelling present in the moment-to-moment action. They made me wonder what a version of this game that invested a little bit more in the larger narrative might have looked like.

The harder they fall

Of course, Extinction doesn’t just feel shallow as a narrative, it’s also pretty lacking in depth from a mechanical standpoint.

Between the slow-motion rune slashes and Avil’s grappling hook-style whip, the game gives you some fun tools to play with. Unfortunately, these tools rarely feel as precise or responsive as they ought to.

Sometimes, it feels like you should be able to climb a surface but cannot – and so you fall to your death. Other times, it feels like it takes you way too long to kill the smaller goblin-like minions terrorizing the citizens of the city you’re protecting, and so you are doomed to fail and repeat a mission you feel like you've already done a dozen times before.

Throughout my time with Extinction, I kept running into situations where the experience felt kinda clumsy and not particularly well put-together. Moments where the seams were shown. The procedural generation that Iron Galaxy have used to build the levels in the game often yields surprisingly good results, but I would have preferred some better on-ramping and/or additional tutorialization.

While learning to dismember, disarm and take down a Ravenii for the first time is exciting stuff, Extinction struggles to escalate the threat or drama from there. Once you’ve beaten one Ravenii, you’ve kinda beaten them all. It’s all very rinse-repeat.

Sure, they might have different skin-colors or weapons. Unfortunately, the process of eliminating their armor, charging up your weapon and delivering a killing-blow is always the same – no matter how many times you do it.

As intimidating as they look, taking down the different Ravenii becomes trivial and tedious long before Extinction manages to break out of that routine and add some variety.

Rather than differentiate Ravenii by weapon or size, Extinction asks you tell them apart by the armor they wear. Some will have more armor than others, which you’ll have to take apart through a series of precise precise aerial attacks before you’re able to deal any real damage to or finish off the giant ogre.

Even then though, there's not a huge difference here in the level of challenge this presents. It just takes longer and once you’ve taken one armored Ravenii down you’ll feel like you’ve seen all there is to see.

The bottom line

There’s definitely something to the David-vs-Goliath gameplay in Extinction, but it doesn't take long for the spectacle to wear thin. I had some fun with this game, but I don't know if I would say I had enough fun to recommend it at the current launch price.

Extinction ultimately emerges as a pretty shallow and forgettable affair when all is said and done. Like the Ravenii themselves, it makes a big first impression but is much lighter when it comes to lasting impact.