Eximius: Seize the Frontline

My first thought booting up Eximius was 'finally, someone is doing Natural Selection properly in a modern engine.' The concept is genuinely sharp: five players per side, four of them running around as Officers in first-person, one sitting in a top-down Commander view building bases, training AI squads, and calling in airstrikes. When both roles click together with real humans on voice chat, you get something that feels alive in a way most shooters never attempt. The two factions - the conventional Global Security Force and the tech-heavy Axeron Industries with their robotics and alternative energy weapons - do play differently enough to matter, and the battlesuit system adds a layer of loadout decisions that goes beyond picking a gun. Equip the right suit for the engagement, bring armour-piercing weapons if Iron Guard units are hitting the field, or watch a proximity mine make a tank irrelevant in seconds. The problem is everything surrounding that core loop. The gunplay sits in an uncomfortable middle ground: not tight enough to satisfy anyone who cares about time-to-kill and shot registration, but not deep enough to compensate with mechanics. Aiming feels loose at 144hz, the kind of loose that makes you wonder whether it's a sensitivity problem or the engine itself. AI unit pathing is genuinely rough - squads get stuck on street geometry, stand in the open exchanging fire instead of using cover, and occasionally march somewhere you absolutely did not order them to go. When your Commander is an AI rather than a real player, which happens constantly given the server population, that asymmetry becomes a real balance problem. A bad or absent Commander effectively hands the round to the other team regardless of how well the Officers are performing on the ground. And that brings us to the unavoidable conversation about player count. Concurrent numbers have been in the low double digits or below for a long time. Getting a live PvP match outside of the community-organised Discord events is closer to luck than routine. The developers at Ammobox Studios have kept the game alive with patches and tournaments - credit where it is due, they did not abandon ship - but the matchmaking reality in 2025 means you are probably playing co-op against AI or waiting for the weekly PvP Fest event to fire up if you want a proper game. Solo mode against bots is a patience exercise, not a shooter. Critics landed around 53 on Metacritic, and that number is honest. There are real sparks here - the visual spectacle of battlesuits, laser volleys, and explosions lighting up urban maps looks genuinely good, and the commander-officer coordination loop has depth that takes time to appreciate. But clunky gunplay, weak AI behaviour, a shallow map pool, and a playerbase that demands Discord coordination just to queue are compounding problems for anyone who came here expecting to drop in and frag. If you have a group of five friends who all understand both FPS and RTS and are willing to organize sessions, this can deliver some memorable matches. Buying it solo on a whim, hoping to find a lobby? That is the harder pitch to make. Fred, Scout Team