We waited a long time for this. Experiment 101 and THQ have finally released Biomutant, a game where you get to play as a cuddly little kick-ass furball that must save the world from a bubbling poisonous oil which is killing all life. Biomutant has been in development for over half a decade, suffering through several delays before finally launching six months after the next-generation consoles, so it’s going to need to pull out all the stops for fans that have waited almost an entire generation. Come explore the world of Biomutant in Rocket Chainsaw’s in-depth review and decide whether you want to save the Tree of Life.

Kicking things off in Biomutant, players get to create their very own furball. Each race has its own perks and can be customised by gender, shape, fur type and more, but the main decision players face at the beginning is which class to play as. There are five classes with a sixth locked behind paid DLC, each offering different initial stats and perks. While the perks are important, stats can be increased as you see fit throughout the game and all classes become quite powerful throughout the game anyway. There are also three difficulty settings, and any experienced gamer won’t have too many issues with the combat unless playing on hard.

The adventure begins with a short tutorial before entering into the open world, and choosing one of the two starter tribes to ally with. One tribe wants to save the Tree of Life while the other tribe sees no value in keeping it alive, and is looking to benefit from the poison that’s wreaking havoc across the world. Interestingly, you can side with a tribe and then convince them to change their ways. This is inherent throughout Biomutant, with constant persuasive techniques available in the dialogue, depending on your karma level. There are six total tribes across the world, and it’s up to you to work with or against them to save or destroy the world. This means keen Biomutant fans will likely want to play through the game several times to see how the tribes react differently to different outcomes.

Before long, we were blasted with an abundance of different ways to upgrade the character. From the core XP leveling system to upgrade points to Bio Points to PSI-Points, Biomutant’s leveling system can be confronting at first. There are three different types of mutation upgrades which require different points to upgrade. Then there’s also your ‘Wung-Fu’ moves, most of which are granted to you, though some require upgrade points. Lastly, you can also spend your upgrade points on general perks and class-based perks. Some of these upgrades are locked behind the overall leveling system, while others can be accessed immediately once you have the required amount of points. Bio Points are found throughout the world while PSI-Points are granted to you throughout the story.

If this hasn’t confused you, Biomutant also has a dark and light system which greatly affects your end-game abilities, along with the story. Some of the bigger choices you make throughout your story and side missions will affect your dark/light ratio, while there are also plenty of small critters scattered around the world that you can either save or kill to boost whichever aura you’re trying to. But wait, there’s more! Biomutant has an extensive armor and weapons system allowing you to modify, craft, and even apply addons to your gear. Thankfully, there’s an option to save specific outfits, giving you the ability to quickly change to protective outfits to combat the different elements in the world.

Finally, there’s your Automaton sidekick. A cute little robo-bug that has been with you since you were a ‘kidling’. This bug plays a larger role later on in the game, giving you more ways to tackle different scenarios, and players will also enjoy its origin story in the many playable flashbacks that occur throughout the game. That’s right, if everything you’ve heard already wasn’t enough, Biomutant also has a ‘flashback to childhood’ story where suddenly you’re taken back to a simpler time where you can’t save your game and don’t know how long it’s going to go for. We’re not sure if the inability to save your game in the flashbacks is intentional, but it sure was irritating.

We found the combat in Biomutant to thankfully be its most engaging aspect. Scouring cavernous networks and hidden areas to take on all kinds of mutated creatures and see what loot is hiding among the scraps was far more fun than following the main story. Depending on your class and perks, the combat can change a fair bit but usually you’ll find yourself using a combination of both melee and ranged attacks, while also taking advantage of special moves. It would have been nice to have access to some of the cooler moves earlier in the game, and possibly to work on upgrading them separately, but we have no quarrel with the combat system in Biomutant other than wishing there was more of it.

Biomutant uses Unreal Engine 4 which is showing its age in 2021. The fact that Biomutant was in development for a year or two longer than it should have been also shows, with the open world looking nowhere near as pretty as some of the other open world games we’ve been exploring over the past year and a half, like Ghost of Tsushima. We weren’t too sure what to expect when booting the game up on PC, but we can confirm that you don’t need the latest PC to run it on its highest settings. While your main character model looks great, some of the enemy character models – particularly as they start to scale larger – have a far more basic design, leaving us feeling like we were playing a game made back in 2017.

Arguably the worst part about Biomutant for us was the narrator. While some community members have stated on social media platforms that they think it will be like playing a game narrated by National Geographic, we found the entire premise of having a single voice actor narrate absolutely everything to be a dreadful experience. It almost felt like Experiment 101 knew it was a mistake too, allowing you to reduce the amount of talking the narrator does in the open world, but even when we turned this right down, it was still too much to bear. Cut-scenes drag on in Biomutant, with the NPC rattling off some gibberish only for the narrator to let you know what they said. It seems like the entire process could have been streamlined to allow players to get back into the action faster, instead of enticing us to skip parts of the story.

In the end, Biomutant is an enjoyable open-world action-adventure game that tries to bring a bit too much to the table. Every turn, players are forced into tiny choices that make tiny changes, detracting too much from the action that we wanted there to be more of. The open world proved to be similar to that of the Mad Max and Just Cause games that the Experiment 101 developers had worked on, in that there wasn’t any real flow from one area to the next and some parts felt incredibly underdeveloped and simply there to add space, but when the action kicked off it was very engaging. While we love large maps here at Rocket Chainsaw, traversing Biomutant’s world became pedestrian, especially when having to trace around different zones or change suits to go through them and having to urinate on every fast-travel sign just to use it.

Rocket Chainsaw reviewed Biomutant on Windows PC via Steam in 1440p with a GTX 1080 and experienced no framerate or stability issues. The game is also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One with next-gen console versions planned at a later date. For more information, head to the official website.