Enlarge / The towering Ravenii are impressive to look at, less so to fight. (credit: Iron Galaxy Studios)
At my most reductive, I’d call Extinction one long string of escort missions. The game struggles and claws to add more variety, in small ways, but it never shakes up or fleshes out its core rhythm enough to justify a full game. Instead, it feels like a frustrating proof of concept, unworthy of its evocative title.
Backing up a bit, Extinction is an action-platformer clearly influenced by Shadow of the Colossus, Devil May Cry, and especially the anime Attack on Titan. A medieval-fantasy world—of which we only catch shallow glimpses—is under siege by towering, teleporting ogres called “Ravenii” who can topple whole cities with ease. You play as a bland meatbrain who, as we learn through a handful of barely animated 2D cutscenes, is also a magical warrior called a Sentinel. The title grants him enough parkour powers to run up the speechless invaders and lop their heads off.
And lop heads he does. Constantly. Head lopping is pretty much Extinction’s only neat trick, though even that novelty crumbles faster than the settlements you’re meant to protect. It doesn’t take long at all to figure out how sloppy the process really is.
Off with their heads
You can’t just kill one of the Ravenii, for instance. First, you need to charge up a decapitating strike. That means bounding around the city, killing largely meaningless lesser monsters by mashing the square button, or standing next to large crystals long enough to teleport handfuls of civilians to safety. This is where the “escort” elements kick in. Besides needing to complete a given objective before the ogres destroy too much of each city, you want to protect civilians from the man-sized goblins. That way you can bank them for killing blows later on.
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