Extinction

As a whole, Extinction is a game built around plenty of promising ideas, but the execution fails to live up to its promises on almost every single point. It's hard to shake the feeling that Iron Galaxy didn't provide the game with the resources it needed to come close to reaching the heights it was aiming for. That's a shame, since all we're left with is a massive skeleton of a game that could have held some real meat.

Misguided, unfair and boring: a poor mix. [Issue#200, p.76]

Extinction is a game which just feels bad to play. It’s technically proficient, looks good and has everything it needs to be a functional game, but it never goes beyond that and assumes the player will be engaged just by the act of killing big monsters.

What started out as a promising sojourn into another world, where I could single-handedly take on a horde of Giants, ends up feeling much like the citizenry of Extinction, tired of fighting, tired of Giants, and tired of being there. There’s enough good here that the failures just hurt more. There’s fun movement when it works, fun puzzle-like combat, but despite its best efforts, there’s no portal big enough to save it from the weight of its own systems.

Extinction is a frustrating mess that has problems that in this day and age shouldn't exist. Camera problems, repetitive missions and frustrating climbing mechanics will have you rage quitting before you get halfway through.

Extinction has some fine enough ideas, but every aspect of its execution, from the narrative to the combat, feels generic and half-baked.

The premise of Extinction is brilliant in theory, but its execution is boring and hindered at all times by a camera that refuses to point where you want it to, and a control system that often doesn’t even respond to simple commands.

Extinction presents a handful of decent ideas, but they’re executed with all the precision and grace of Godzilla stomping through Tokyo. Buying this sloppy, ugly, derivative, repetitive, technically inept, and unfairly difficult monstrosity is guaranteed to leave your weekend in ruins.

Play one hour of it and you've basically done a bit of everything it has to offer; then it's rinse and repeat for as long as you can bear to stick with it. It's a frail and monotonous game destined for the bargain bin.

Perhaps this review seems a little harsh but please bear in mind that Extinction is a terrible game that is retailing close to one hundred dollars. That is, without question, day-light robbery. This mess isn’t even worth close to half of that, in fact, I wouldn’t even recommend playing it for free.

By turns mildly irritating and laceratingly dull, Extinction is a hopeless mess with one of the worst third-person cameras you'll ever encounter. Give it a miss, eh? [June 2018, p.86]

The terrible thing is that, on paper, Extinction sounds great.

Fighting giant monsters should never be as dull and formulaic as this cheap and nasty attempt to remind you other better games… and anime.

Even if Extinction had released as a ten or fifteen dollar digital download, I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone – life’s too short and filled with genuinely great games to waste on terrible experiences like this one. Given that it released at full price, however, it almost feels like a deliberate and calculated insult towards any game that ever earned its price tag. It is an aggressively terrible game that should be avoided at all costs.