Second Extinction
Engaging our lizard brains for a dinosaur-slaying co-op shooter
PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Jurassic Park got it so wrong. Just when we’d started to think of dinosaurs as majestic, even lovable, creatures, we find ourselves overwhelmed by terrifying hellbeasts intent on razor-clawed murder. Awaiting extraction at the end of a mission, waves of mutant dinosaurs besiege our position and we are finally overwhelmed as a vicious pack of velociraptors makes short work of our three-person team, picking us off one by one. Clever girls.
“There has been a kind of defanging of dinosaurs,” explains Second Extinction lead producer Brynley Gibson of his desire to “bring the terrible lizard back”. Dinosaurs are indeed the stuff of nightmares in Systemic Reaction’s online multiplayer FPS. They have taken over the Earth, and your squad of three, each with customisable loadouts and abilities, must drop into specific maps with objectives to complete and dinosaurs to kill, trying to reclaim the planet. While it is designed as a jump-in-andplay multiplayer experience, it has a longer game in mind thanks to its war effort feature that tallies up online player successes to shift the tide of the human-dino war.
“Let’s assume thousands of battles are happening all over the world every day,” Gibson says. “That is altering the big war. At the end of each week, we tot up the numbers and the system changes the world. You’ll get a big update, maybe an emergent event, a new type of dinosaur suddenly appears, and players can see, ‘Oh, we did that!’”
Areas of the world map are thus defined by changing threat levels depending on how overrun by dinosaurs they are, which in turn dictates the challenge presented by each mission. It’s a game about picking your battles, something Gibson tells us the developer needed to do when deciding what to include in the game. As a self-publishing division of Avalanche Studios, its compact team meant that in order to build some of its bigger ideas, Systemic Reaction had to think small. Or at least, not quite so big.
“We’re there to have a look at this technology that has been developed, often for these triple-A games, and see what we can do with it,” says Gibson. “We’re kind of like the little kid with the hand-me downs – we get the tech and we’re like, ‘Cool, but I’m going to cut the bottoms off and sew a badge on.’ It does shape what we’re going to do but I think that’s what allows this little team to have done so much.”
Second Extinction’s world size is consequently smaller than other Avalanche games, leading Gibson to refer to it as a “big map” rather than an open-world game. “With
Its war effort feature tallies online player successes to shift the tide of the human-dino war
open-world games, you have this idea that, ‘Okay, I’m now committed to hundreds of hours.’ Whereas we wanted to have these shorter burst sessions where you could get one or two in over a lunch hour: short, bookended, but still the world is affected in the long term.”
Despite the limitations of team size, having access to Avalanche’s Apex engine was a huge boon, with its volumetric terrain rendering in particular used to carve intricate underground systems into the maps. These claustrophobic subterranean encounters add a survival-horror feel, and during our hands-on session, with Edge joining Gibson and creative director Emil Kraftling for a mission in a snowy, mountainous map, we discover just how horrifying these cretaceous killers can be. Though our session ends in failure, our desperate last stand is no less thrilling for it. “In this minute-and-a-half, watching for the dropship in the sky, you can get some crazy combinations of enemies coming in that just really challenges you to the brink,” says Kraftling. “When you succeed, unlike we did today, that’s such a payoff. That’s the core of the fantasy that we want to recreate.” It’s one we’ll happily buy into, and we’ll take Systemic Reaction’s take on dinosaurs over Jurassic Park any day. That way, we won’t lose any sleep over sending them straight back to hell.