Exterminauts is a session-based cooperative shooter played from a third-person perspective against artificial-intelligence enemies only. There is no player-versus-player mode. A crew of up to three takes a contract, deploys to a worksite on Planet Tian, works through a chain of objectives while under attack, survives a final defence and extracts. Everything the game does is framed as paid work rather than a heroic mission, and the vocabulary follows: jobs are Work Orders, starting one is Punching In and finishing one is Punching Out.
The Rig
Every shift begins and ends aboard the Rig, an orbital base above the planet. This is where the crew reviews the job board, picks a contract, configures loadouts, and clocks on. Between runs it is also where earnings are cashed in, upgrades are purchased and equipment is improved for harder deployments. Developers have described this as the persistent side of the loop: each completed work order feeds resources back into the gear you take on the next one.
Choosing a Job
Contracts are selected from the board rather than queued into blindly. Developers have said the expected duration is shown at selection so a crew can match the job to the time they have. Stated run lengths sit roughly in the fifteen to forty minute range, with shorter maintenance jobs at the low end and multi-stage repairs at the high end.
Because different contracts field different alien creatures with different weaknesses, and because different damage types are more or less effective against them, checking the job before building your loadout is a real decision rather than a formality. Crews are expected to discuss equipment before clocking on. Contracts covers the job structure in full.
On The Worksite
Once the crew drops in, the mission mixes three activities the developers have summarised as fix, fight and collect.
Activity | What It Involves |
|---|---|
Fix | Repairing damaged infrastructure and restarting stopped machinery. Objectives run in stages, so a single job can chain several separate repair steps. |
Fight | Exterminating the Pests attacking the site. Combat is continuous rather than arena-gated, and the ecosystem is described as adapting to the squad's tactics. |
Collect | Gathering valuable resources found on the worksite, which feed back into equipment upgrades on the Rig. |
The repair work is what makes the shooting cooperative rather than parallel. A crew member operating a terminal, closing a valve or welding a component is committed to that interaction and effectively defenceless while it runs. The other two have to hold the ground around them. In a hands-on demonstration this played out as one worker restoring a pipe run while the other two intercepted incoming creatures, then rotating as the objective moved. The result is that repairing and fighting are one continuous activity rather than two alternating phases.
Movement and Traversal
Movement is confirmed to include sliding, shooting while sliding, rolling and zipline traversal. Ziplines double as a level-design tool, moving crews to elevated positions and, at the end of a job, off the site entirely.
Punching Out
Completing the contract objectives does not end the shift. Clocking out triggers a final stand: aliens converge on the crew's position and the team has to hold until extraction arrives. Developers have described this phase as running around two minutes.
This is also the one moment where the crew stops purely cooperating. During the clock-out defence, players compete on kills, and the highest scorer earns a bonus on their pay. Abandoning your teammates still gets everyone killed, so the incentive is to hold the line and grab what you can at the same time. Developers have framed this as cooperation and competition sitting side by side in the same two minutes.
Extraction and Payout
Once the timer runs down the crew leaves together, in the demonstrated case by riding a zipline off the site. The contract is not counted as finished until the crew is out. Back on the Rig, earnings are converted into upgrades, tools are improved and loadouts are reconfigured before the next work order.
Difficulty and Escalation
Successive deployments are described as increasingly challenging, with a wider range of extraterrestrial threats. Storefront accessibility data confirms adjustable difficulty through preset levels and the presence of control reminders. The gamescom demonstration build was explicitly set to a lower difficulty so that press could follow the systems.
Not Yet Confirmed
No mission, biome or worksite has been named, other than one large piece of machinery shown in the demo.
No alien species has been named, and no enemy roster exists.
No progression system, levelling curve, mastery track or unlock structure has been described beyond buying upgrades on the Rig.
No economy detail: no currency names, no prices, no payout formulas, and no figures for the expenses the crew is said to accrue.
No difficulty tier names or modifier system.
No information on session length caps, failure states, revives or respawns.
No matchmaking, private lobby, server region or dedicated server details.
No confirmation of any endgame, raid or repeatable high-tier activity.