Exterminauts Turns You and 2 Friends Into Intergalactic Pest Control Techs With Some Really Spicy Secondary Weapons | IGN Preview

Key Preview Takeaways:

• Exterminauts feels a bit generic at first.
• Its default weapons aren’t very new or exciting, but the secondary weapons are far more interesting.
• There is a meta to engage with.

Horde shooters are really the perfect games to double as a hang with your friends, as the objectives are typically pretty simple and clear, letting you chat hot goss over comms while you’re ripping hot lead in game. Because of this (and the key successes of a handful of them) these games are kind of everywhere in 2026, and after some hands on time with Exterminauts, a third-person co-op shooter that puts mad science tools in your hands in order to defend and upkeep the assets of your capitalist overlords, I think that fact is going to be their biggest issue. It's got a good look and rounds can produce some fun chaos, but I had a hard time not comparing this to all the games it’s clearly taking notes from and I was left questioning if it had the juice to get me to clock in for a long shift.

The gimmick and tone that ties it all together is fun at first, as you and your party work for the MegaCorp that needs its assets maintained and protected from the (implied) native bug threat that continues to rip and tear its infrastructure to pieces. This sort of “evil corporate master vs. exploited labor dynamic” is a fun starting point for a satirical world that never really gets bolted down. The banter between your dispatcher and the Planetary Director from the corporation is certainly quippy, but I didn’t find it very funny. There is a slapstick aura around everything you do, but many of the little barks and hollers characters do in the field sound like poor Deadpool impressions.

It’s pretty easy to list what Exterminauts does that happens to be a version of something you'll find somewhere else. So what does it do that’s unique? The tasks that bring you and your group of up to three to the planet surfaces often require input in ways that can be surprising. Helldivers II required a lot of d-pad inputs in order to fix computer glitches or call in support. Here, when you arrive on scene to fix some infrastructure damaged by the local wildlife, it often involves a bit more engaging resolutions. One that came up a few times was welding, where I have to follow the crack on the side of a pump with a flaming torch. It's not too complicated a pattern, just askew enough that you need to make some adjustments, but not so jagged as to be confusing or distracting while under enemy assault.

Another required two of us to work in tandem to ratchet some mechanical device up from bottom to top, with one side being able to only go so far before the other had to put their weight on it. “Required” is an exaggeration, in fairness, because you can definitely do this solo, but I liked these for how they encouraged people to work together to solve a problem, as opposed to just pushing buttons the right way. I didn't see too many other examples of these co-op chores in the limited maps and time we had with the demo, but I hope there are many more of these as development continues.

In addition, there are side jobs that pop up on your map when you’re nearby, which are supposed to be smaller sub-jobs for more minor rewards, like releasing a special elite monster to kill for some this-run-only reward. But I kept stumbling on to an abandoned mech, which was neither small nor minor. The punch it packs makes it super worth going to find it, but only one person at a time can pilot one, and when its ammo is gone it's gone. But this is a good measure of the dichotomy of these finds. I was pretty unmoved by the former and found the latter to be great every time.

Running from job to job when deployed means you’re destined to encounter some of the insidious insectoid fauna that exist to impede you. The concept of shooting your way through bugs to get from objective to objective is about as synonymous with the sci-fi extraction shooter as spouts are to tea kettles, but these beasties came in various forms and with novel quirks for each. There's some that are 80% mouth and leap long distances to put you in it. There’s some that have long necks that fan like the spitter dinosaur in Jurassic Park that kills Newman from Seinfeld, except they shoot lasers out of their big singular eye instead of poison. There’s floating Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon-looking ones that spit out flying jerks that shock you bioelectrically. These bugs are a wonderfully strange bunch to look at.

They can be tough to wrangle when they start to amass into a wave of teeth and legs, but the squads I was in didn't have much trouble. We didn't turn the difficulty up that high either - we spent our missions between 2 and 4 of a possible 8 levels as we learned the ropes and gained some basic gear. Things do get way more dangerous solo, where I was throwing lives directly into the shedder that was the alien menace. Upping the difficulty adds more and tougher pests, more potential repair jobs, and higher possibilities of environmental hazards like extreme weather and the like. Every extraction requires hunkering down and holding off a grand finale of waves while your ride comes to get you, and these were usually the most dangerous parts of the mission - though they were also the most perfect time to use your more rare support items, like sentry turrets and a tube you can attach yourself to to give yourself infinite ammo for a brief period of time.

Some of the tools you can employ to exterminate these pests are notable, but I found most of the assortment available to me at the time to be wanting. A smattering of kinetic bullet blasters sat comfortably in the well-known territory of “guns like the ones you’re already familiar with.” These assault rifles and SMGs were fine, operating well within the range of my expectations, though not being particularly impressive versions of what you’ve seen a hundred times. I don’t expect Call of Duty levels of detail, but some more compelling gun sounds and haptics would step these up dramatically.

Fortunately, the secondary weapons were a bit spicier. You default to a plasma sludge launcher, which sticks globs of caustic goo onto victims, piling on the corrosive debuff and doing damage over time. This fountain of pain is strong, and especially good for groups of enemies. On the flip side, I also got my hands on the CrossCut, a weapon that slings circular saw blades of a comically large size. When these hit enemies they stick to them, spinning in place and chewing through whatever is trapped there with it. You can charge these blades to extend the time this berserk beyblade delightfully does its dirty deed. All of these special weapons can be further buffed by pulling out a jumper cable sort of contraption to make the next shot a doozy at the expense of some battery power. This is an interesting mechanic that probably hides more value than I could shake out in only a couple of hours - maybe an enhanced weapon it can boost penetration values of or cause special side effects outside of just doing way more stagger and health damage. Each of these secondaries add a bunch of utility and dynamism to combat in a way that makes me wonder why the basic weapons are here at all.

You unlock access to these weapons through Sponsorships, which act almost like classes, giving you access to a unique passive ability that hypothetically sets the tone for how you play. The Bullet Crown sponsorship ups the damage you do on critical hits and provides access to a rapid-fire SMG, so aggressive damage-dealing is your forte. Conversely, Vardhan is focused on support, spreading some of the healing you get from your recovery items with other members of your squad. I don’t think I spent enough time playing to see these actually make squad members play differently, but I can see how having a mix of these passives in a group could be a benefit. I wouldn’t say that a Bullet Crown guy should focus more on shooting bugs than clearing objectives, or that a Vardhan should be hovering over life gauges like a WoW Cleric, but the boons they provide are obvious.

There are a lot of meta games to play as well. All of your gear can be upgraded so long as you have enough coins and other materials that can be found out in the field. Like Exterminauts’ contemporaries, there is a season pass filled with functional and cosmetic gear that you can earn the points for through play or just spend real money to unlock instantly. After gaining some levels, you’ll be able to add trinkets that give you even more passive buffs that I'm sure can be mixed and matched to get something resembling a focused and efficient build. There’s plenty of things to earn, and I seem to be getting the resources needed to buy and upgrade my gear at a pretty breezy pace, but it's hard to know how good any of this is without more time spent. There's also the biggest question: how much time am I really willing to spend to earn it?

I've played about five hours of the blue-collar bug-squasher so far, and admittedly it’s grown on me. The special launcher weapons and diverse array of weird-ass bugs keeps skirmishes interesting, and I'm still in the process of finding new jobs to do and new biomes to do them on, so the sense of discovery is still there. But I don't think Exterminauts has made an airtight case for horde shooter fans to choose it over their current favorite. It doesn't have the open-endedness of a Deep Rock Galactic, the slam-dunk tone and mood of Darktide, or the strong satirical comedy of Helldivers II. None of that is a death sentence, especially not this early in development. But it has its dirty work cut out for it.

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Jarrett Green is a frequent contributor to IGN. Talk video games with him on X/Twitter at @Jarrettjawn.