Your dinosaur battles actually constitute a race against another team, however, and the goal is to complete your objectives more quickly than the other squad.

The typical mode we saw was Dino Survival, in which you're dropped into a semi-destroyed location and are forced to fight off waves of dinosaurs at different points. In the Exoprimal matches we played, you jump onto a team with four other players, either from your party or added to your session through matchmaking.

It's all about appeasing the seemingly homicidal artificial intelligence Leviathan, which is endlessly gathering combat data based on your performance in order to create better mech suits and put down the extra-dimensional dinosaur threat once and for all.

While matches involve fighting off waves of prehistoric creatures, your actual goal is to beat another team of mech-suited dino hunters. We played about three hours of Exoprimal during its recent closed network test, which gave a sense of some of its multiplayer modes and the mech suit character classes you can use within them. Gunning down thousands of raptors in a robot super-suit sounds weird at best, but in practice, it turns out Exoprimal is a thoughtful cooperative shooter that puts a premium on teamwork and team composition to defeat all manner of prehistoric menaces-as well as other players. The team-based multiplayer game has players running around in mechanical mech suits, fighting waves of dinosaurs that pour out of huge portals floating in the sky. From trailers and gameplay videos, it can be tough to get a handle on Exoprimal.

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