Extinction review: The bigger they are, the harder they fall

Despite having some interesting and fun mechanics, the lack of content in Extinction doesn’t justify its price tag.

Extinction had some great potential. A high mobility hack-and-slash game where the focus is on killing giants is the kind of game I’ve been waiting for for a while.

Unfortunately, developer Iron Galaxy couldn’t quite make the game live up to that potential.

In Extinction, you play the role of Avil, the last Sentinel. The Sentinels were an order of great warriors and heroes who were trained to fight and defeat the Ravenii, a race of giants set on hunting humans down to extinction.

With the help of several companions, Avil must try to ensure humanity’s survival against impossible odds.

While the story isn’t the most original, it surely isn’t bad. The game does, however, have an issue with telling it. The plot is revealed through dialogues at the beginning of each level and is mostly drowned out in unnecessary vagueness and uninteresting discussions between the characters.

The main focus of Extinction is the Ravenii, the giant monsters who walk around the cities destroying everything in their path. To defeat them the player must cut off their heads. Not so easy to do when these creatures are the size of buildings.

To do that, you need to charge up your Rune Energy; this is done by doing basically anything in the game, from saving civilians to breaking Ravenii armor.

Once the Rune Energy bar is full, you can climb the Ravenii and cut off its head. Cutting any other limb doesn’t require Rune Energy, but the armor that protects them will need to be destroyed first. Besides, cutting off arms and legs only slows the Ravenii down until they eventually grow back.

As the game progresses, the Ravenii you fight will begin using different types of armor. The main difference between them is its position and the number of times you need to hit it. You sometimes need to use specific attacks against specific armor type, but it’s not enough to add much variation or gameplay value.

Along with the Ravenii, you also need to fight the Jackals, the Ravenii’s smaller, weaker allies. The Jackals are goblin-like creatures who spend most of the game being annoying and killing the civilians you are trying to save.

You fight them using a more classic fighting system with rather simple combos. It’s also the thing I hated doing most in Extinction. The Jackals provide little to no challenge, don’t introduce any new mechanics and generally take way too long to kill.

Unlike the Ravenii, the Jackals don’t require you to make use of Avil’s excellent mobility skills, which is by far the best part of Extinction. Dashing through the air and jumping off buildings and treetops while pulling yourself forward with your whip to reach your goal feels fantastic and is very useful when fighting the Ravenii.

The player can earn skill points to unlock and upgrade Avil’s abilities. While the upgrades do help to fight your way through the army of giant ogres, they aren’t particularly exciting and don’t change or improve any part of the game. They are mostly improvements to your stats and don’t add a lot of cool new abilities.

The game is split into separate levels, each with a main objective and several side objectives. These objectives can range from killing a number of Ravenii, holding them off for a set amount of time, or saving civilians that are stuck on the battlefield.

These objectives aren’t particularly interesting and they definitely get repetitive after a while. The only real difference between the levels is the increasing difficulty of the enemies, and even that isn’t a significant change as the mechanics for defeating them remain the same.

Many of the levels are randomized and generated from the same few presets, such as a forest area or a city area. While it might sound like that would make every run unique, the levels are often somewhat empty, or not eye-catching enough for me to notice any significant variation between them.

However, the game does look great, even if levels tend to repeat themselves. The scenery looks quite nice, even when it zooms past you as you jump around, and the enemies are all and distinct from one another in their design.

Overall, Extinction did have moments where I enjoyed the fast-paced action and giant-slaying.

Unfortunately, with the amount of content currently in the game, and how quickly it all gets stale and repetitive, I can’t really recommend it. Extinction feels more like a polished mini-game which just one neat trick, rather than a full game that’s worth your time (and money).