[SPOILERS AHEAD]

Let me take a deep breath first...

I really wanted to love this game, and in a way, I do. But it leaves so much to be desired.

On paper, it has everything I love about a video game - it's done by a small dev studio, it has an open-world apocalyptic theme to it intertwined with western and eastern architecture and design, it has an intriguing story and a choice-based mechanic. But all those things feel like they haven't been done justice. Like somewhere during its development Experiment 101 decided to go the route of "Let's just try and copy the BOTW format and hope for the best." And sadly, it didn't work out.

The game at its core has a lot of soul and it just screams for it to be polished up by the developers. Unfortunately for each positive, there is a negative. Let's talk about some of those -

It's easy to get into and easy to master but in the end it comes to just pressing two buttons. The doge and the attack. There is no i-frames to take note of. The enemies are all basically auto-locked onto you, so whenever you try to dodge or jump out of their way, they are like a homing missile that follows you around. At least in one of the updates the game received a lock-on feature that made it a little more comfortable to fight enemies but nothing else was fixed regarding combat. Heck, not to mention unbalanced fighting styles. Magic does close to no damage, guns are over-powered and melee lays somewhere in the middle.

Enemies are also basically copy-paste versions of each other. You get the standard melee enemy, the standard armoured melee enemy, the standard gun-wielding enemy and sometimes you'll stumble across a big hunk of chunk that is a mix of all those and is basically an annoying bullet sponge. An auto-targeting bullet sponge at that.

You basically get one mount through the whole game. One mount which has multiple skins. Some of which are derpily adorable, but that's all they are - adorable skins. None of the mounts has any kind of special attack, better speed, better handling.

IIRC, there are four additional modes of transportation. However, those are locked to story-specific areas and are mostly used to defeat one of the four world bosses. You cannot summon those mounts outside of those four different biomes that have been pre-designed by the developers, so it kind of makes them useless. At one point you even get a flying mount that... you guessed it, can only really be used in one specific area pre-arranged by the devs, and nowhere else.

Skills don't matter all the much. Neither does the class you pick at the beginning of the game. I pre-ordered the game specifically to be able to get the samurai class, or well... the mercenary class. But it turned out that was unnecessary because apart from one or two rather useless perks, which class you pick during creation of your character doesn't really matter.

I haven't completed the game fully because it feels like I don't need to. After defeating two world bosses (out of four) and going through an abundance of repetitive side quests that there seems to be no end to, I got bored. Go from point A to point B, kill the boss, collect the trinket and bring it back or destroy the tower and then rinse and repeat.

In addition to this, the choices you make don't really matter at all. There is no real consequences to picking light or dark side options other than what powers you are allowed to use, and even then - you can basically max out points for both sides and uses both types of powers, light and dark. Storywise, there isn't much of an impact regarding which side you go with.

And I think that's Biomutant in a nutshell, none of the things you do in the game really matter. The open world while visually stunning is empty and boring. All areas of interest are a copy-paste version of each other, once you've cleared the first tutorial area of the map, you have basically seen it all. So in conclusion, it's a very ambitious game that tried to go way beyond what it wanted to be and it ended up a very mediocre product.

It wants to be The Witcher 3 with a mix of Breath of the Wild and it fails at doing that. It provides close to no potential for replayability and doesn't engage the player enough with its story.

For what it's worth, the developers of the game have been listening to player feedback and have been releasing regular patches post-game release that fixed a lot of problems. On top of that, apparently the team are still working on future updates for the game, so that's a nice bit of news.

All in all, I think it's a game that needs some love from both, the devs and the players. Is it worth the full price of £55? Hell no. Is it worth slugging through it when you have nothing else to play and the game is on sale? Hell yes! Does it show potential and is still better than Cyberpunk and the plethora of other recently mediocre games released by AAA studios? You know it! Especially given that it was made by a team of about 20 people!

A solid 6/10 mugs of beer. With potential for a lot of improvement.