Hands-On Preview: Exoborne Brings Wild Weather & Exciting Adventure To The Open-World Shooter

Easily shiftable between third-person exploration and FPS action, the hands-on preview for Sharkmob AB's post-apocalyptic landscape of Exoborne teases an exciting new addition to gaming in 2025. Set in a world ravaged by corporate greed and natural disasters, players are tasked with joining the resistance and fighting back through the use of powerful exosuits, crafty tactics, and a whole lot of guns.

It's an exciting new approach to the open-world shooter, with a live-service model that promises to continue expanding the scope of the world. The gameplay is an enjoyable approach to the concept, easy to pick up but with countless ways to tweak and experiment with the experience. Screen Rant got the chance to go hands-on with an early version of Exoborne, as well as speak with Exoborne Executive Producer Brynley Gibson and Narrative Director and Sharkmob Co-Founder Martin Hultberg.

The World Of Exoborne, Explained

Exoborne Throws Players Into A Wild Post-Apocalyptic Take On Open-World Shooter

Exoborne is a wild new addition to the shooter landscape that benefits from an expansive world, fun gameplay, and an intriguing story. Within the world of Exoborne, the Earth has been reduced to a much more chaotic place. Set in the near future, Exoborne takes place in a world where a cold conglomerate known as Rebirth's efforts to use experimental technology to control climate change resulted in a far more destructive environment. Now, the surviving humans have banded together into loose alliances as they scavenge the remnants of society for supplies, weapons, and hope.

The tactical extraction shooter drops players into Colton County and gives them a set amount of time each round to explore the remnants of small-town America. Players can fly in solo or work together in groups of three, giving them better odds of survival at the cost of splitting any potential valuable loot drops or weapon discoveries. Players are also outfitted with Exo-Rigs, customizable mechanical exosuits that provide the players with a host of unique abilities and advantages as they encounter raiding parties, automated defenses, and lethal weather turns.

The Nature Of Exoborne Can Become Your Worst Enemy (Or A Secret Weapon)

The World Is Always Changing On Players In Exoborne

This approach invites natural experimentation and exploration, which adds new elements to a game that could have been repetitive. As a result, each deployment feels different, with new corners of the map to explore and fresh challenges to discover. During the playthrough, I got to flank bandit camps in an attempt to overtake them, only for flaming twisters or lightning storms to interrupt the combat. It introduces a natural sense of unpredictability to the missions, and reinforces the thematic throughline that Exoborne is set in a dangerous world where anything can happen.

Hulterberg revealed that the decision to push the game in that post-apocalyptic direction stemmed from a desire to grow after the success of Tom Clancy's The Division, telling us:

"I've always enjoyed what-if scenarios and post-apocalyptic stuff. I worked on The Division, where we got to ruin New York. With Exoborne, we were like, 'what's the next natural step after ruining New York?' Well, it's ruining the world. So we needed a global scenario. We landed on the extreme forces of nature, which to me is a very primal thing.

"You, as an individual, can't withstand that force. So it becomes quite scary, and it was interesting to try to turn that into gameplay mechanics. How can we trigger that reaction? Where players go, 'oh no, there's a tornado. Oh no, the tornado is on fire or full of toxic smoke!' That's been the fun part, trying to find these 'oh sh*t!' moments. We internally refer to as FUBAR moments. We want FUBAR moments that are bigger than life."

Exploration Is The Key To Exoborne

Exoborne Turns Players Into A Scavenger At The End Of The World

Gameplay in Exoborne will feel familiar to anyone who has played something like Fortnite, with a third-person shooter perspective that allows room for innovation and innovation. Players can customize their Exo-Rigs to reflect their preferred playstyle, whether that relies heavily on close-combat or ranged assaults. Exploration is a key aspect of the game, with scavenging the ruins of Colton County for supplies and weapons. That's one of the areas where Exoborne thrives, as the game utilizes several different approaches to movement.

Vehicles can be used to cover ground quickly, but traversal is most exciting through the use of parachutes and grappling hooks. This allows players to scale mountains, reposition during firefights, or make a hasty retreat. Given the ever-changing and increasingly strong winds of Exoborne's setting, it's easy to deploy the parachute and take to the sky. This opens up new dimensions of the map and to combat as a whole, and serves the game well. According to Hultberg, the key to traversal goes back to the previous SharkMob AB game, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt. Hultberg explained:

"Bloodhunt was a lot about traversal on vertical and horizontal space. We learned a lot of lessons from Blood Hunt, because it was, in many ways, a fantastic game, but it was also an extremely hardcore game. It was set in the middle of Prague, with very dense streets and very intense combat. It was all about jumping between buildings, going up and down. We noticed it was a bit too intense, and it sometimes affected the fluidity of combat. You could break combat so quickly by jumping over building and then you were on the other side.

"We wanted to keep that momentum up in combat. We wanted to keep the fluidity. [In Exoborne], there are more open spaces. There is verticality, but... it is harder to avoid combat like that, but you can still dodge and jump. I saw some of the players get into it real quick, switching between the jump to the grappler and then using the glider for. It. It's almost intuitive to use these tools, and [players] pick up on it quickly. Itt's fun to see that. That was the objective of our traversal system."

Gibson revealed that the game at one point incorporated free climbing, which would have allowed players to simply scale ridges and buildings as needed. However, "it was not very fun slowly climbing up a wall. It's not interesting. So it didn't make sense to keep it when we had a grappling hook or a way of leaping high into the air. So it didn't really match the tone of Exoborne."

The World Of Exoborne Is Full Of Surprises

How Exoborne Uses Live-Service To Expand The World

Designed as a live-service game where new weapons, missions, and elements can be incorporated into the title over time, Exoborne benefits from a world of unique characters and factions who operate in the ruins of Colton County. Certain characters will make specific requests, tasking players with prioritizing medical supplies, clearing out raider encampments, or locating certain weapons. Pursuing certain paths over others will open up new storylines for players, immersing them further into the world naturally through gameplay.

Looking ahead to the full release of Exoborne, Hulterberg explained:

"We're now developing it together with the community who plays the game. It makes no sense for us to be the only ones who drives the development. We're going to be looking at what the player base interacts with. How do they play the game? What content do they like? Because that's what we need to focus on... we already have plans. There will be additional narrative content. There will be additional content like weapons and skins and stuff we can do to change the map."

Gibson elaborated:

"There's a different sort of scope of changes that we will do. With a live game, I think it's really important that when you come back in on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, there is fresh stuff there. Whether that's challenges or tweaks to the map, we have tools that enable us to change our game relatively quickly... The game should feel like it's a living place. It's evolving all the time."

Exoborne Is About Embracing The Chaos

Exoborne Is A Fun Shooter That Reinforces Exploration Through Natural Gameplay Adventure

My first playthrough of Exoborne was chaotic in the best possible way, a shooter that felt easy to pick up but fresh with every deployment. Within the first five deployments, new weather patterns increased the risk of further exploration. However, that was also key to the experience. Finding a rare bottle of alcohol that was worth enough money to completely restock the weapon loadout and upgrade the Exo-Rig gave a sense of satisfaction. The challenges set by the enemies on the map and the weather erupting all around the player added a natural sense of risk and reward.

Should you take the extraction early now that you've acquired a certain amount of supplies? It's definitely the safe bet, given that players lose a lot of their equipment and inventory upon death. However, the potential reward of finding new unearthed treasure troves serves as a perfectly tantalizing tease for further adventure. The ticking clock before a necessary extraction just makes the entire experience more exciting, and naturally builds on the player's own sense of adventure. Exoborne builds on a lot of established ideas and turns it into something that feels surprisingly unique and consistently exciting. As Gibson put it:

"Exoborne has got sort of elements of open world action shooter, and these different systems that we have running on the map at the same time. There's the world itself, and then the forces of nature. Then of course, we have different NPCs moving around. We have world events that can be triggered. And then of course there are all the other players. So you have all these different elements. Each time you go in, it can be a little bit different. It can change.

"That's where you get the kind of personal stories, and not the game narrative. If we're playing together, this is experience that we have together. If you play with friends, afterwards you can be like, 'do you remember that time we played and we were going to extract, but then the tornado came through, and then you fell out of the drop ship?!' Those are the stories that people remember when they play games. That's something we really want to capture with Exoborne."

Exoborne will be available for PS5, Xbox Series X S, and Steam in 2025, although a full release date has not yet been announced. The first Exoborne playtest will run from February 12 to February 17, and players can now register to take part in the playtest.