Extinction – Review (PC)

By Dave Lambden Last updated May 5, 2018

In a post Dark Souls world, there is a fine line between a challenging game and a frustrating game. The former succeeds in making the player feel as though their failures are a direct result of their own mistakes. The game gives you just enough of a sniff or taste of the carrot to make you feel as though you were just that close to overcoming an obstacle to entice you into one last try. The latter corners you into a feeling that the game is just not giving enough to make the drive forward appealing. A third-person ogre climbing hack and slash, Iron Galaxy’s latest foray into the original IP arena, Extinction, unfortunately falls into the latter category.

The player jumps into the crimson robes of one of the “Last Sentinels,” Avil. Along with his main ally Xandra, Avil finds himself in a world where human run kingdoms battle each other in endless futility, while a dark enemy lays in wait. Once the darkness rises, Avil is the only one who can save the world from Extinction. As a sentinel, Avil is granted the ability to harness rune power. With Xandra’s help, Avil is able to utilize this power in many vital ways within the game including the energizing of portals and slaying Extinction’s big angry ogres, also known as Ravenii.

Extinction utilizes a unique water color art style that lends itself well to bringing the world to life and jumping off of your screen. Avil’s scimitar style sword strikes and leaping vaults leave behind trails of energy represented by vibrant colors. Fast and smooth character animations also help in the overall vibrancy of the game.

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Players are initially faced with only insignificant enemies called Jackals who spawn into the world and gravitate directly to the civilians of the world. They are dispatched easily, but clearing them out quickly feels like a chore. Jackal’s are spongy and take close to ten hits before falling. Your main attack is bound to a single input and impressive looking combos can be initiated with a combination of clicks and small delays in between. Attack combos are fun to watch on screen, but difficult to time and don’t feel rewarding after the second or third execution. Players will quickly resort to spamming the attack button. A secondary attack has Avil enter a slow motion mode where he can target individual enemies or pieces of a Ravenii’s armor to attack. These attacks are powerful, can be landed from quite a distance, and feel admittedly awesome if chained together.

Once you’ve mastered the minor annoyance of dealing with Jackals, it’s time to move onto the ultimate goal of slaying the towering Ravenii and stop them from leveling the villages of the kingdom. Extinction attempts to employ a sense of strategy and resource management by stopping enemies soon enough to salvage some of the land. These resources, in the form of helpless residents and buildings that are still standing, are represented by a percentage meter at the top right hand corner of HUD. The meter starts at 100% and as jackals and ogres chip away at the once peaceful environment, the meter slowly decreases to 0%. At this point, the game resets and the player must start over. This all presents a strenuous and pressing situation where you need to prioritize your tasks. Do you save civilians first? Clear out as many jackals as possible? Or go straight for the literal elephant in the room? This is where Extinction’s futile balancing act begins.

Successful completion of a level is achieved by clambering all the way to the top of an ogre’s body and removing their heads with a particularly impressive and acrobatic animation. Avil can reach the summit of his monstrous foes by grabbing on at the legs and clumsily scurrying to the top (which will usually result in getting caught in the ogre’s big smelly armpit). Although this can also done by utilizing a whip unlocked early in the game to vault instantly to the waist and up the back of the ogre.

All ogres on the map must be conquered before moving onto the next portion. It all sounds great – a substantial challenge in front of you with a mountain of an enemy obliterating innocent towns folk like insects and buildings like paper mache. Ideally this would create a sense of tension and urgency to balance attack and defense before it is too late. However the only way to take out the ogres is to remove their head. A level cannot be cleared until the ogres fall and performing the decapitation can only be accomplished when your rune energy meter is fully charged.

And this is where the major frustration of Extinction lies. The rune meter can only be filled by completing a select few tasks. Among them are killing jackals, attacking and removing pieces of armor from ogre’s appendages or the appendages themselves and, the most effective way, powering portal crystals and transporting townsfolk out of harm’s way. The first three methods give Avil very little energy meaning they must be done several times to fill the rune meter. This leaves saving citizens as the only way to reasonably farm enough power to conquer the ogres.

Since rune energy does not stack, once you deplete the meter by taking down an ogre you must start the chore of refilling it over again. Quite often I found myself deciding it was easier to quit out and restart levels because the ogres and jackals had already killed off all the civilians. None remained for me to save. All ogres on the map stood naked as I had already removed all their armor, and still I had a less than half empty rune meter. While the map was still peppered with jackals, they provide such a measly amount of energy that it wasn’t worth the effort. Even if I decided to take an attempt at killing enough of these smaller enemies off to maybe scrap together the rune energy needed to take out just one of the multiple ogres, the city would have already been destroyed… and that is a game over. You can continuously target the ogre’s limbs once armor is removed and, while this act is fun and empowering the first few times, it gets repetitive fast. The simplest and least frustrating path forward was to start over and try again. I felt cornered into this decision.

While not a fundamentally flawed game, Extinction does not provide the player with enough of a mechanism to reasonably progress through the game in an enjoyable manner. It’s a shame – with the thought of a David vs. Goliath type experience coupled with a need to balance conflicting priorities, the framework of a unique and exhilarating game is there. Unfortunately not enough players will stick through the grind to recognize this.