Second Extinction

This is going to be a long one, yall.

Okay, so I know this isn't an anime, but I have nowhere else to vent about this. Plus most anime fans are also gamers so I hoping for some overlap. Also, my boyfriend is tired of hearing me talk about this game so..... here I am.

Firstly I want to be open about my bias, I love this game. Despite all the flaws and where it falls flat, I play this game every day. I also want to be open about my gaming experience level. I have been gaming for less than a year, I started seriously gaming about seven months ago. Mostly I've played first-person shooter games, like Borderlands (2 and the pre-sequel) and Halo Infinite, but I'm not all that versed in the gaming world and I'm not all that great with gaming.

The release of this game preview ended up being the perfect storm for me personally. The main draw of this game for me is the dinosaurs. Ever since I was a kid I've loved dinosaurs. Not only do I love dinosaurs, but this game was released right as I became competent enough as a gamer to play FPS on my own. This is actually the first and only game that I really play without my boyfriend. (If he didn't find it unplayable, I would still make him play with me though.)

A Positive Note

Because my review is going to mainly focus on game glitches and what can be made better about the game, I would like to start with some positive notes. And yes, despite the problems with this game, there are charming aspects to it.

• Dinos!

As I stated above, I love dinosaurs! I would like to commend Systematic Reaction and Avalance Studio Group for stepping into this untapped market. There hasn't been (to my knowledge) a first-person shooting dinosaur game since Turok, which I played as a child. Though that mostly consisted of me looking for dinos then running from them because I was horrible at games back then. And while there are current dinosaur games available like Jurassic World and Arch they either arent shooting games at all or focus more on the survival aspects. A specifically FPS dino game has been missing from the market for a long time.

• The map

Now when I say the map, I don't necessarily mean the topological map you can pull up on a mission. But... if you game you probably already know that. I can tell that the artists were given plenty of time to make a detailed map. Before writing up this review, I took the time to explore every nook and carny I could think of. I went out of the playable area to see everything. One thing I noticed, running out of the playable area in the harbor (over the frozen ocean) that eventually there are actually spots where the ice isn't completely solid and water has seeped through to the surface, as it would IRL. I also claimed up the backside of the mountains of Aga Hills and Vustus Bay and while, in some places, it wasn't the easiest, it was doable (DISCLAIMER: I play with Ortega, and I had to use her dash to reach some areas, I'm not sure if you could reach the same places with other characters). The snowy mountains scenery is beautiful, and feels like a real location! (at least the areas without surrounding buildings but well get more into that later.) The fact that you can roam into areas that feel like weren't intended to be used as a playable area helps make the map feel bigger and truly free roam.

• Game Mechanics Take my opinion of this with a grain of salt if you'd like, but the game mechanics are really nice. I haven't played very many games to compare this against, but the movement seems fluid, the dinos react realistically (when you take into consideration they are mutated), and the shooting mechanics feel natural. The menu isn't horrible... I've definitely been in other games where the UI was much, MUCH worse

The Problems

I am aware this is a game preview, but if they are going to have it available for play, then they should expect to hear some stuff back. I plan on sticking to using subsections and bulletins to help keep me from rambling, and while I plan on being as analytical as possible, I will be including my opinions and personal takes on the game.

Glitches

(Images are screenshots from one of my gaming sessions. I've only experienced this glitch twice)

This is, surprisingly, going to be the shortest section. I play on XboxOne, so this section only going to be looking at problems with the Xbox game. From my understanding PC players haven't been having as many issues.

• Getting Kicked As mentioned above, I want to play this with my boyfriend, and he has played a few times with me. On the few occasions that I have gotten him to play with me within a few minutes, he gets kicked from my lobby. I don't think we've been able to complete a single mission together. I know other people have been having this problem as well.
  

• Spawning... or Lack There Of Another problem we noticed is sometimes, whoever is not the lobby host will actually not have the dinos spawn. He would be running straight past herds (flocks?) of raptors, leaving me to fight them alone because they simply were not spawning on his screen. We played horde mode with him as lobby host, and after the first round, dinosaurs weren't spawning on my screen. That's the last time we tried to play together so I can't say for sure if this is still an ongoing issue and I haven't seen people on the Second Extinction subreddit talking about this. So it's possible that was an 'us issue', though I will say, we have fiberoptic 500GBPS internet service so I can't see it being an issue with my internet quality or speed.
  

• Freezing and Crashing On numerous occasions, I've had the game freeze and crash on me. Most of the time, here lately it freezes right after deployment or right after extraction. Sometimes if I hit the home button on my controller that will unfreeze it though that doesn't work all the time. I will say it's crashed a lot less than when I started playing it about two months ago. When I started playing, it would sometimes crash while loading the game up, while playing, just really any time at random. As of late, the only times it has been crashing for me is after I have cleared out a few different sections on the map. This is extremely frustrating because that is when I have racked up a LOT of materials and research points... that end up getting lost forever.
  

• Audio This is probably the most notorious glitch amongst Second Extinction fans. EVERY SINGLE TIME I PLAY I lose audio. I didn't hear the T-rex for the first five times I killed one. I honestly couldn't tell you if the flatbacks or the bulls even make any noise. I'm sure they do, but I couldn't tell you what they are. It makes playing the game extremely hard because you lose those audio cues of dinos being close by or coming up behind you. I'm sure to some people, like my boyfriend, having no audio makes the game unplayable... unless he's using that as an excuse not to play with me... *cries* Not having the audio does make it harder to play and enjoy regardless, almost immediately after touch down the audio will start to glitch out. It'll randomly cut in and out, it'll start sounding like a skipping record, sometimes the wrong voice will play (I'll be playing as Ortega and one of the male character lines will come through). You can't hear Sarah half the time. Then it will just cut out completely. I've honestly gotten to the point where I play youtube while I'm playing so the room isn't completely silent.
  

PRE-SEASON SEVEN Like I've mentioned before, I am aware this is a game preview. I do not expect the game to be perfect yet. With that being said, how have we gone through SEVEN PRE-SEASONS and STILL have glitches that make the game borderline unplayable? I don't know anything about game coding and I'm sure finding a solution to these problems are more difficult than I am aware of. It just does give off the feel that fixing these problems aren't a top priority for the developers, especially considering they haven't openly addressed most of these issues at all, that I could find anyway.

Constructive Criticism and Major Problems

Now for the meat of this review. Most of the problems I have with the game are gameplay aspects I feel are missing or just would have liked to see. And I have quite a list here, some are bigger issues than others, but all negatively affect the gameplay and the replay value. Some of what is on this list are small little aspects that I feel would be useful, some are bigger issues that I feel would greatly impact the gameplay.

• Needs More Dinos T-rexes, Bulls, Flatbacks, and five variants of raptors. That's it. Four types of enemies. That's just not enough. Especially considering there are roughly 700 recognized species of dinos (according to the American Museum of Natural History). Give us more variety! I was not kidding before when I said I loved dinosaurs as a kid, and I'm about to put that childhood obsession to work! Listed below are just a few examples of dinosaurs that could be added to the gameplay.

Allosaurus: slightly smaller than the t-rex, the allosaurus is another carnivore that one would feasibly run across while planetside. It would be easy to add her into the gameplay by scaling down the model of the t-rex and changing the skin. She could easily be given cool mutations, like the necro-mutation we see in flatbacks when planetside.

Stegosaurus: a very well-known dino, the stegosaurus would be another easy addition to help the world-building feel more genuine. The stegosaurus would attack in a similar method as the ankylosaurus (flatback), by swinging its tail and charging at you.

Spinosaurus: A simi-aquatic carnivore, the spinosaurus could be found around the harbor and shorelines. Standing at around 44 meters tall and weighing in at around 20 metric tons, a spinosaurus hunt would be one hell of a mission. (This would especially be a cool add-on if they plan on including changing seasons, so when the ocean melts the spinosaurus could be lurking in the waters.)

Diplodocus: This sauropod (quadrupedal dinos with long necks and tails) arguably has the longest neck and tail of them all. In fact, the tail of the diplodocus was so long scientists believe it could actually be used as a whip in defense, with the capability of making a loud clapping boom! Commonly depicted with small spikes running down the length of its body, game developers could easily use the general features of this animal to turn it into a terrifying mutated version of the real thing.

Gallimimus: This fairly familiar omnivorous dinosaur, is a theropod (bipedal, generally carnivorous dinosaurs) in the Ornithomimid family (meaning 'bird mimic" these dinosaurs shared a resemblance to modern-day ostriches). These dinos could run fast and had a sharp bird-of-pray-like beak and stood in at over 6 feet tall, at the hip. Having these guys run you down while planetside could make for a tough fight.

Pachycephalosaurus: While this bipedal dinosaur is herbivorous, its dome-shaped skull made of a thick solid slate of bone would be extremely damaging. It is not 100% confirmed whether these dinosaurs did the headbutting they are most commonly associated with, there is evidence that it is possible. Having this thing charge at you like a ram would be difficult to defend against.

I honestly could go on and on naming dinosaurs that I think would make a good addition to this game, and I might make a post on it later, but I'm going to spare you from this for now. I know this blog post is probably longer than it should be.

• No Campaign/Overarching story

One thing that really would help the overall playing experience would be to have an overarching storyline or a campaign for the missions. To me, it almost feels like what I do in-game doesn't matter from session to session. What I do when completing missions doesn't continue on to the next mission or in the free roam. I want to feel like I am working towards an end goal with my games and I don't feel that way when playing this. I don't get the feeling that I'm making any headway with the war efforts of the ERA. I want more background to fluff up the world. I want to know what happened that caused the dinos to come back and mutate. What is that blue stuff the bigger dinos spit at us? What is all that green gunk around for and where did it come from? Same for the gas, and why is it not toxic to us? They could take a page from Borderlands The Pre-Sequal and give us an oz kit. Make the green gas in the red zones toxic and have us have to get oz kits in order to breathe. And please give us an in-game explanation as to why the gas moves from zone to zone. Another thing to address as far as the storyline, at the beginning of the game when the director addresses us, it feels more like he's calling down to any survivors left planetside. He almost inadvertently addresses us as if we're the ones left on earth, but that's not the case. We're deployed, usually under his purview. His speech just doesn't fit the gameplay in my mind, unless we end up meeting survivors left planetside but that doesn't seem to be the case.

• Cut Scenes I can't believe I'm actually saying this because I normally skip cut scenes, but this game NEEDS cut scenes. We are lacking so much, lore, explanation, and exposition that cut scenes would be the best way to fix it in all honesty. Adding cut scenes could also make us get more attached to the characters were playing and make them and their story feel real. Utilize the cut scene when introducing new types of dinosaurs by having the new dinos be released one at a time, and secretly. I don't want a big update from the discord page saying "Hey, dino-x is coming to the gameplay on this date!" Let me stumble across it midgame, and have a little cut scene explaining what it is. Give me the same surprise that Ortega or any other in-game character would feel when running across a new unexpected dino.
  

• Better Usage of Map on Free Roam Earlier on I spoke about how I like the maps, which I do, but not allowing us inside the buildings while on free roam really takes me out of the open-world/survival aspect. Even while on a mission, our access to buildings is restricted. Make it a mission to access and open up all the buildings. Allowing us inside the buildings could open up a lot more gameplay options as well, like weapon change-outs, contract updates, and much more that would just make the gameplay feel more fluid and realistic.

Tutorials, Game Play, Missions, and Events

• Tutorials are Useless I'm not a tutorial type of gal when it comes to video games. I prefer to fumble around until I get my bearings. So when I saw on the Second Extinction subreddit someone (I can't seem to find the post to link it here) saying that it was useless, I figured I better test it out myself before typing up this review. And let me tell you, they were right. Almost everything in the tutorial was something I, as a novice gamer, figured out within five minutes of my first deployment. They went over how to walk, jump, climb, use grenades, supply drops and, how to shoot. Now I'm not saying this shouldn't be in the tutorial at all, but it definitely should not be the only thing in the tutorial. To make the basic training more comprehensive, they could have included a little bit about each type of dinosaur we would encounter while planetside but also what their mutations are. Going over the type of materials dropped and how common each item is would be a good thing to go over for new players. A brief overview of how to deploy and extract, enable new contracts, and upgrade weapons would have gone a long way to helping newcomers to the game as well. This would have also been a good place to sneak in some expansion about the lure of the Second Extinction Universe.
  

• Lack-luster Missions According to Xbox, I have played a total of 3 days, 10 hours, and 26 minutes collectively. Within that time, I have completed all the missions, gotten 24 of 29 achievements, and collected 760 of the 1,000 available gamer points. In almost 4 days I've pretty much completed the game. Comparing this to my most played game, Borderlands The Pre-Sequal, which I've played just over 5 days collectively, I've gotten 29 out of 63 achievements, 535 out of 1,370 gamer points, and probably less than 1/3 of the missions completed. This greatly diminishes the replay value of the game. Now, other than adding more missions, they could also change up the optional objectives. Rather than having each zone have pretty much the exact same objectives, make each zone have different types. Add new optional objectives to give us more variety of play.
  

• Emergence Events Chances I've been playing this game for a good bit of time now and, while there are 9 available according to the SE wiki page, only have had 3 events active for me; Banshee, The Mist, and Enraged. The Mist and Enraged have happened once each while Banshee has happened at least 4 times. I had to go down the internet rabbit hole, as shallow as it is, to find out about different events. There seems to be a disparity between the chances of an event happening. I found in my research THERE ARE TWO DINOS I'VE NEVER SEEN because the events they spawn in haven't been available to me!? That is complete and utter malarky, and inexcusable. I'm not saying that those events should have happened for me by now, but I am saying had the Banshee even not happened at least four separate times, I would have had more of a chance to see these new dinos.
  

• What do we get for leveling up? As of now, all we get for leveling up is new contracts, and that feels cheap in my opinion. Most games give you tokens to level up your abilities, or outfits/skins, even unlocking new enemy types. Why not give us some of that too. Let me upgrade my character's abilities. Give us a skill tree and with each level unlocked with that character we get a point to building our skill tree. You could easily incorporate the arguments and research points into a skill tree that will give each character at least three times as much growth as they have now. I personally like maxing out my character and getting her to god-like skills. I want the road to her god-like abilities to be somewhat difficult, but once she gets there, I want her to be OP AF. That is nowhere near a possibility in this game.
  

• The Flatback Abnormality Flatbacks are abnormally hard in comparison to the other large dinos. Bull and Armored Bulls seem like baby elephants in comparison. I can adequately handle 3-4 bulls by myself, it's difficult but doable. I can handle a rex on my own no problem, and wouldn't immediately run if I happened to be up against two. Flatback on the other hand, completely different story. They are extremely difficult to kill and if I dont have frag grenades, I find it impossible. Again this is possibly related to the fact that I'm still a novice gamer, or that I solely play as Ortega.
  

• IS THE GOLDEN EGG EVEN REAL?? This probably speaks more to my skill as a gamer, but I can not for the life of me find this damn egg. I've gone planetside a few times specifically looking for and even researched where it spawns and still nothing. I understand it's a rare achievement and supposed to be hard to find, and I'm okay with that. I'm just kinda sad I haven't found it yet.
  

HUD, UI, and Settings

• Decline Contracts As for contracts, allow us to decline them! I have a cluster of contracts that I'm probably not going to complete taking up space because the character I play with can't use the required weapon, or I'm just not good enough at the moment with said weapon. Let me choose to decline or dismiss contracts and either put them on another tab or move them to the bottom of the list.
  

• Collected Inventory Sometimes when I play I'm on free roam for an hour or more, and during that time I collect a lot of materials. It would be nice if there was some way where I could see an inventory of what I've collected and how much. Especially considering I'll go out in free roam specifically looking for a certain material I need for an upgrade. An inventory key would also be helpful.
  

• Changing Equipment Allow us to change out equipment while deployed!! At the very least, let us change out grenades and guns. this is where having the map fully open to the inside of buildings would come in handy. Have a few different guns or grenades laying around inside for us to switch out if we want or need them.
  

• Augments I have unlocked all but two of the available augments in the game. All I need to do is Vitatlity+ and Lifestream. Both say "skill dinosaurs to acquire augment", but I have no idea what dinos to kill or how many. There's nothing showing me my progress on getting these augments unlocked either. Let's say hypothetically I need to kill 100 raptors, and 75 bulls to unlock Vitatility+, I have no idea of telling how close I am either. There is no progress bar or anything showing me X /100 raptors or X /75 bulls. Getting new augments can almost feel pointless as well because we have to continue to upgrade them with materials collected for them to even become useful. To top it off, our characters can only use three of the augments at a time.
  

I think this game has major potential and I love it despite everything it's missing. With a few tweaks and some more world-building, this game could really go the distance. All the developers need to do is go the extra mile and the fan base will quickly grow. Those who are already fans of the game and can see its potential. I've seen numerous fans giving their insight on what this game needs and for the most part, we all seem to be on the same page. I know if the developers listen to what we're telling them this game will be one for the history books.