Primal Carnage
Skip · Shooter · 2012
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
SKIP IT.
The value isn't there at $4.99.
- Length
- 6h
- Value
- $0.83/hr
- Reviews
- 76% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 3 GB of memory, ATI 3850HD 512 MB or NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB, 4 GB of storage. Windows only.
A savage online shooter, where players do battle as man or beast in class-based deathmatches and a frantic escape mode. Unleash your inner dinosaur!
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $0.79. That was June 2016. 53 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 70 percent off, roughly 7 weeks apart.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 41 percent on value. It is cheaper than 75 percent of its genre. Among the games that feel like it, Dino D-Day ($9.99, scores 64) beats it on value, while it beats ORION: Prelude ($0.99, scores 45).
The press gave it 67; the people who bought it give it 76 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says about 4 percent of players ever finish it. On a 6-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. Of the 424 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 11 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2020 to August 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 9 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 725 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 33 have a larger share. The typical game sits near 5 in 1,000, so the score docks it. Inside the two-hour refund window, 53 percent of the 1,479 reviews written there were positive, against 76 percent overall, and those are 31 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 6 hours; clearing it takes 20, which is 3.3 times the campaign.
The drop-off
92% start to 4% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 6-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
What players say
It's a dead game now. Can't really do anything unless you get a big group of friends together to play.
I've played this game years ago, and I had fun doing so. However, having played it recently; it seems to be a dead game. Zero players online on any of the servers. I don't recommend purchasing this in it's current state due to this.
Another classic. While Extinction did fix a lot, I still remember the original fondly.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Primal Carnage scores 46/100 on the BANG Score (a skip). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/215470/primal-carnageThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 6, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.