Unreal Engine 3 is decent, but it has begun to show its age, and players who demand the best visuals from every game they play will not be satisfied by what Primal Carnage: Extinction offers.
However, for anyone who values gameplay above visuals, Primal Carnage: Extinction looks pretty good for its age and runs surprisingly well on various hardware due to its relatively modest requirements.
Players can select from various paid and free skins to customize their character; however, there is no character customization in the traditional sense, such as choosing their character’s physical attributes such as skin tone, facial structure and hairstyle.
Solo players can play survival mode, essentially a worse version of Call of Duty Zombies with poor AI and overpowered weapons; while it’s not bad for a few minutes here and there, pathing issues and a lack of map diversity ensure that it gets old fast.
Primal Carnage: Extinction allows players to play cooperatively in survival, a wave-based horde mode that appears to be inspired by Call of Duty Zombies.
Unfortunately, Primal Carnage: Extinction’s survival mode, unlike Call of Duty Zombies, is very generic and suffers from a slew of game-breaking issues, including a rather nasty spawn bug that can result in dinosaurs getting stuck out outside of the map, forcing the player to quit and lose all progress.
Primal Carnage: Extinction retains a small roleplay community that engages in roleplay adventures on specially selected free-roam servers that allow players to roleplay as humans or dinosaurs in a semi-open-world environment.
While I am not a huge fan of in-game roleplay, I think it’s fantastic that the developers have catered to roleplayers instead of forcing them to roleplay on total deathmatch servers, which are prone to “invasion” by players who may not be aware that a roleplay session is underway.
Survival mode weapons are imbalanced, and I was able to one-shot a raptor with a Colt revolver and down Carnotaurus without three shots from the same weapon.
While the developers may wish to maintain a hero fantasy for players, feeling like dinosaurs are less of a threat than a feral housecat does little to encourage long-term replayability.
Primal Carnage: Extinction is a shooter video game developed by Circle Five Studios and published by Circle Five Publishing, it was released on 4 April 2015 and retails for $12.99.
Primal Carnage: Extinction is available on the following platforms: PC, Playstation 4, and Playstation 5.
While Lukewarm Media (the original developers of Primal Carnage) appear to no longer exist, Circle Five Studios and Pub Games have continued to update Primal Carnage: Extinction since its relaunch in April 2015.
While some of these updates are on the shallow side, adding new cosmetic microtransactions and weapon balancing, the developer continues to release substantial new content, including new playable dinosaur classes such as the Pachycephalosaurus in August 2021 and the upcoming Waterlogged map, which is currently undergoing its final stages of development.
This level of dedication is all the more impressive when you consider that Primal Carnage: Extinction has never been a success on PC, and while it has a small stable community, the online player count peaked at a meagre 864 concurrent players in December 2015, and while it has come close to this figure once or twice since, the average online player count is just 118 at the time of writing this.
Regardless of what you feel about the original developers and their mishandling of Primal Carnage during its launch phase, you cannot deny that the publisher and new developers have gone above and beyond to offer players value for money and make right on earlier mistakes.
While we do not know how many people are playing on PS4, it averages 127 players online on Steam and can peak as high as 380+ players as recently as October 2021 (Halloween event).
In all likelihood, the PSN community is doing equally well. With the news that the developers are working on a slew of improvements for the console build, this community will likely grow substantially, especially if the developers take the time to add support for PlayStation 5 features such as instant loading and adaptive triggers.
Image credit Primal Carnage: Extinction - Published by Circle Five Publishing and developed by Circle Five Studios.
Primal Carnage: Extinction supports:
Primal Carnage: Extinction supports:
The Primal Carnage: Extinction in-game store sells:
Primal Carnage: Extinction is rated PEGI 16 and contains the following:
If you are desperate for human vs dinosaur action and Ark Survival Evolved is not your cup of tea, Primal Carnage: Extinction is a cheap and cheerful alternative that offers players decent value for money.
