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Sharkmob AB cut its teeth on Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodhunt. Now it’s upping its FPS game with Exoborne. After spending hours in the open-world extraction shooter’s alpha, I’m hyped for more. Exoborne builds upon the PvP bullet ballet of its predecessor. It also expands the extraction genre in exciting new directions. Whether you’re trading 12g blasts with the other Kodiaks or camping extract like a Tarkov rat, you’re probably having fun. With new maps, equipment, and other content still to come, I can’t wait for this storm to hit.
Get to the Chopper
Each Exoborne raid starts with you skydiving into an open-world map littered with loot. You can play solo or in three-person squads, but I prefer the former. Before leaving your HQ, you’ll need to decide what gear to bring. Die and you lose whatever you carried, turning every loadout into a gamble of risks and rewards. Once you land and start exploring, loot prioritization becomes king. Do you raid easy bandit camps? Maybe it’s better to hunt Artifacts, riding the tornadoes from one stash to the next? What about fighting your way through a robot army to rob high-security vaults? Of course, that’s assuming the weather’s on your side.
Storms drive Exoborne‘s gameplay almost as much as bullets. Rain and fog obscure your vision and keep your glider low. Fire tornadoes can burn and pummel you or aid your escape with a last-second updraft. Plan as carefully as you want, but when Mother Nature acts, you may be left scrambling to bag what loot you can and escape with your life. Weather isn’t the game’s deepest system, but it injects a dose of unpredictability and excitement into already riveting raids. Even when storms become oppressive, blocking your retreat or slowing your flight to extract, they’re never boring.
A Rat’s Life for Me
Surviving bots and bandits is easy. Players, however, can make Maynard and beyond feel like the Lands Between. Want to break into rare vaults to loot the gold bars and other treasures? You’re competing with an army of Kodiak chads, ready to shrug off your bullets and return fire with slugs and missiles of their own. Thanks to the weather, your glider, grappling hook, and Exosuit abilities, positioning is key to survival. I’m not a CoD lobby champ with the world’s highest K/D, but by out-planning other players, I won more than I lost. That’s a fancy way of saying I camp the extraction chopper with the zealous attention of Pinhead watching someone touch his puzzle box.
Drop mines. Deploy gas drones. Perform aerial scans. Find the nastiest rathole or crow’s nest possible and dig in with a sniper rifle. The loot will come to you, packaged like a birthday gift in someone else’s backpack. In Exoborne, there are plenty of counterstrats if you hate this kind of thing. To me, it’s the best thing about the genre. Until the last moment when the doors of the chopper shut, you can be ambushed and lose it all. Exoborne‘s core gameplay is so well done that even my failures were fun. An ambush devolves into chaos, and a blast throws you from the extract chopper. Now you’re bleeding out in the dust, watching your loot fly away without you.
Exoborne and Extraction Shooter Highs
Of course, at this stage, there are plenty of graphical issues and random oddities to polish and improve. Still, Exoborne has already offered me some of the highest highs of any extraction shooter I’ve played. It’s not perfect, but it’s already exceptional. Whether you’re a loot goblin, squad enthusiast, solo demon, or pro ganker, Sharkmob has something for you. If it can stick the Superman landing, extraction shooter fans are in for something special. Exoborne launches for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S in 2025.
