Exterminauts Turns You and 2 Friends Into Intergalactic Pest Control Techs With Some Really Spicy Secondary Weapons | IGN Preview
Looking for a comprehensive Exterminauts preview to see if this new third-person co-op shooter deserves a spot on your multiplayer rotation? We spent five hours tackling bug infestations, testing wild secondary weapons, and completing corporate repair chores to find out if this sci-fi extraction shooter stands out in a crowded market.
Key Preview Takeaways:
- Exterminauts feels a bit generic at first glance, but builds deeper appeal over time.
- While its default primary firearms are standard fare, the secondary weapons offer eccentric and satisfying gameplay.
- Interactive repair mechanics force genuine squad collaboration rather than simple button inputs.
- A complete meta-progression system featuring Sponsorships, gear upgrades, trinkets, and a season pass offers plenty to unlock.
What Is Exterminauts? Corporate Satire Meets Co-Op Horde Action
Horde shooters are really the perfect games to double as a hang with your friends. Their underlying objectives are typically simple and direct, allowing you to chat hot gossip over comms while you are actively ripping hot lead into incoming alien swarms. Because of this formulaic appeal, combined with the massive commercial success of several recent genre giants, these co-op experiences seem to be everywhere in 2026. After getting hands-on experience with this third-person co-op shooter, that exact market saturation might prove to be the biggest hurdle the game faces.
In this title, you and up to three friends take on the role of expendable blue-collar contractors working for an all-powerful MegaCorp. Your daily job responsibilities involve being dropped onto hazardous alien planets to defend and upkeep corporate assets against a massive, native insectoid threat. The wild creature horde is constantly ripping and tearing the company infrastructure to pieces, leaving it up to your squad to maintain property value at all costs.
This evil corporate master versus exploited labor dynamic serves as a fun starting point for a satirical world. However, the humor does not always land as effectively as it could. The banter between your operational dispatcher and the corporate Planetary Director is certainly quippy, but it rarely delivers genuine belly laughs. Furthermore, a heavy slapstick aura covers everything your squad does on the field, though many of the context-sensitive barks and hollers from player characters end up sounding like budget Deadpool impressions.
Despite these narrative hiccups, the core loop brings plenty of visual flair. Matches quickly cascade into chaotic battles where hot lead meets endless waves of chittering legs and mandibles. The main question that remains after extended play is whether the game possesses enough unique identity to keep players logging in for long shifts over competing titles.
How Exterminauts Compares to Helldivers 2 and Genre Rivals
When analyzing an upcoming multiplayer release, it is easy to list off every mechanic that happens to be a direct variation of something found elsewhere. What really matters is what the game does differently to establish its own identity. In terms of objective design, the tasks assigned to your squad of up to four players often require hands-on physical inputs in ways that are genuinely surprising.
Where games like Helldivers II require players to tap out specific directional D-pad sequences to clear terminal glitches or call in tactical support, this game makes structural repairs far more tactile. When your team arrives at an objective to repair infrastructure damaged by local fauna, the resolution usually requires active physical interaction rather than basic code entry.
For example, one recurring repair task requires players to weld damaged machinery. You must manually trace a crack along the side of a mechanical fuel pump using a flaming torch. The pattern is askew enough that you have to make precise manual adjustments along the seam, yet not so complex that it becomes frustrating while your teammates fight off incoming alien strikes.
Another co-op chore demands that two players work in tandem to ratchet a heavy mechanical device from the bottom to the top of a tower. One side can only crank the device so far before the second player must put their weight on the opposite side to keep the mechanism moving. While you can technically brute-force these activities solo, the design actively encourages players to physically work together to solve structural problems instead of just pushing buttons in a set sequence.
Map Events, Sub-Jobs, and Piloting Abandoned Mechs
Beyond the primary objective line, secondary objectives regularly populate your tactical map as you explore the environment. These side jobs are designed as smaller sub-tasks that offer quick, run-specific rewards. In some cases, a side job might involve hunting down and triggering a special elite monster that drops temporary buffs for the duration of your current deployment.
However, the quality of these side activities can vary significantly. While hunting down minor elite monsters often feels underwhelming, coming across an abandoned mech unit parked in the field completely flips the script. Stumbling upon one of these walker suits is neither small nor minor, offering a massive power spike to whichever player claims it first.
The sheer firepower packed into these abandoned mechs makes them well worth tracking down on every map. The main drawback is that only one player can pilot a mech at a time, and once its heavy ammunition reserves are depleted, the suit is permanently spent for the rest of the match. This dynamic highlights the contrasting quality of map events, where biological target hunts can feel flat while mechanical discoveries deliver huge highlights.
Navigating between these objectives guarantees non-stop combat encounters with the local wildlife. Moving through aggressive swarms to get from one objective site to the next is as fundamental to a bug-hunting extraction shooter as spouts are to tea kettles. Fortunately, the aggressive beasties roaming these alien biomes come equipped with diverse designs and novel combat behaviors.
Analyzing the Alien Bug Threat and Extraction Scenarios
The alien enemy roster features a wonderfully strange selection of insectoid monstrosities that keep engagements dynamic. Understanding how these creatures attack is vital for survival during high-level extractions:
- Melee Leapers: Aggressive beasts that are roughly 80 percent mouth, capable of leaping long distances across the battlefield to swallow players whole.
- Laser Spitters: Long-necked creatures featuring a wide frill resembling the spitter dinosaur from Jurassic Park that killed Newman from Seinfeld. Instead of spitting poison, these beasts fire high-powered energy lasers directly from a massive single eye.
- Parade Balloon Floaters: Massive, hovering floaters reminiscent of Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that continuously spawn bioelectrically charged flying pests to shock your team from above.
When these diverse enemy types amass into a single wall of teeth, claws, and beams, combat becomes extremely intense. During early hands-on sessions played between difficulty levels 2 and 4 (out of a maximum 8 difficulty tiers), coordinated squads were able to manage the incoming hordes effectively while learning basic equipment interactions.
However, attempting missions solo ramps up the danger exponentially. Playing without squad support often results in throwing lives directly into the mechanical shredder of the alien menace. Scaling up the global difficulty slider introduces tougher alien variants, increases the frequency of required repair jobs, and introduces severe environmental hazards like extreme localized weather.
Every mission concludes with an intense extraction phase where players must hunker down and defend a drop zone against final finale waves while waiting for their transport vehicle. These extractions represent the most dangerous segments of any run, making them the absolute best time to deploy rare support stratagems like automated sentry turrets or tethered ammo lines that grant brief periods of infinite ammunition.
Weapons and Combat: Primary Guns vs. Secondary Special Weapons
Weapon selection plays a massive role in how the game feels during active combat. While the overall gear selection is broad, the basic primary firearms fall into standard, predictable archetypes. The basic loadout choices consist of kinetic bullet blasters that sit comfortably in familiar territory, offering standard assault rifles and submachine guns that function as expected without providing much punch.
These kinetic weapons get the job done, but they lack distinct audio impact and haptic feedback. While no one expects Call of Duty levels of gunsmith polish, punchier sound design and heavier tactile responses would significantly elevate the core shooting experience.
By contrast, the secondary special weapons offer far more exciting tactical options. Players start with a default Plasma Sludge Launcher that fires sticky globs of caustic goo onto target bugs. This sludge stacks a heavy corrosive debuff over time, making it an exceptional tool for melting dense clusters of low-tier enemies.
I also got my hands on the CrossCut, a weapon that slings circular saw blades of a comically large size.
Another standout secondary option is the CrossCut, a heavy launcher that fires massive circular saw blades. When these giant blades impact an enemy unit, they embed themselves directly into the target's armor, spinning continuously to slice through flesh and bone. Players can even charge up the launcher prior to firing to extend the duration of the spinning saw blade's berserk attack.
Adding another layer to combat is an overcharge mechanic powered by a battery-operated jumper cable tool. By connecting these jumper cables to your secondary launcher, you can consume battery charge to drastically buff your next shot. This interaction increases stagger values, boosts armor penetration, and inflates raw damage output, adding welcome depth to the moment-to-moment gunplay.
Sponsorships and Class Abilities Breakdown
Class progression is organized through corporate Sponsorships. These Sponsorships function as player classes, unlocking specific passive bonuses and signature equipment tailored toward distinct playstyles.
The Bullet Crown Sponsorship caters to aggressive, damage-focused players. Choosing this corporate partner increases critical hit damage across all weapons and grants immediate access to a rapid-fire SMG. Players running Bullet Crown are built to lead the charge and burn down high-priority targets rapidly.
Conversely, the Vardhan Sponsorship acts as a dedicated support class. Vardhan operatives feature a unique passive perk that automatically spreads a portion of any healing items consumed to nearby squadmates. While support players do not need to sit back like traditional MMORPG healers, having a Vardhan member in your fireteam provides vital health sustain during hectic extraction defense events.
Combining complementary Sponsorship passives within a four-player squad opens up strong tactical synergies. A balanced team combining front-line damage dealers with support-oriented corporate contractors can push into significantly higher difficulty tiers while maintaining consistent mission completion rates.
Meta-Progression, Upgrades, and the Season Pass
Outside of individual planetary drops, players engage with a detailed meta-progression hub between missions. Every piece of hardware, from primary rifles to special secondary launchers, can be upgraded using credits and raw crafting materials gathered during field operations.
The game features a multi-tiered progression system designed to keep players engaged long-term:
- Weapon Upgrades: Spend hard-earned coins and field minerals to boost base weapon stats, reload speeds, and magazine capacities.
- Trinket Slots: Level up your character to unlock accessory slots that hold stat-boosting trinkets, allowing you to fine-tune specialized character builds.
- Corporate Season Pass: Earn points through active play (or purchase tiers outright with real money) to unlock functional equipment, unique cosmetics, and utility items.
During initial play sessions, resource acquisition rates felt remarkably fair and breezy, allowing for steady gear progression without overwhelming grind walls. However, evaluating the long-term balance of these meta-systems will require dozens of additional hours once the full title launches.
Is Exterminauts Worth Playing? Final Hands-On Impressions
After putting approximately five hours into this early build, the game certainly has a way of growing on you. The chaotic secondary launchers, combined with an eccentric cast of alien bug designs, keep combat engagements lively. Furthermore, exploring distinct planetary biomes and discovering new objective types maintains a fun sense of initial discovery.
However, in its current state, the game faces stiff competition from established genre titans. It lacks the deep, procedural sandbox flexibility of Deep Rock Galactic, the grim grimdark atmosphere of Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, and the razor-sharp political satire of Helldivers II.
Falling slightly short of those genre leaders is by no means a death sentence, especially for a game still actively in development. The core foundation of hands-on repair mechanics, chaotic overcharged weapons, and corporate satire provides a solid baseline. With further refinement to basic weapon feel, audio feedback, and comedic timing, this co-op shooter could easily carve out its own dedicated fanbase.
While you are evaluating upcoming multiplayer releases, check out these recent previews of other major titles we have tested recently:
Jarrett Green is a frequent contributor. Talk video games with him on X/Twitter at @Jarrettjawn.
Overall, our hands-on Exterminauts preview demonstrates that while the co-op horde shooter market is crowded, clever repair chores, weird alien bug designs, and destructive secondary weapons give this corporate extraction shooter real potential leading up to launch.
from IGN India
-via DynaSage
