It’s something of a rarity for a game to have a rough launch and eventually find its feet after an extended period of time. There are success stories behind No Man’s Sky, Cyberpunk 2077, and some others, but Biomutant deserves to be in the same conversation. After several years in development, the game received middling reviews in its 2021 launch. Out of seemingly nowhere though, it received an upgrade to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in September 2022. Is this upgrade superior to the 6/10 status quo the game received the year prior?

Getting your bearings in Biomutant is an uphill battle as you learn its systems, combat loop, and crafting. There are ample tutorials to get you into the vast open world, and after you’re out of the initial vault, everything is up to you from where you travel next to who you align with in the tumultuous tribal war between six factions. The world is dense, and it took me dozens of hours to fully explore, with no shortage of side quests and things to do to satisfy the internal checklist that makes the genre’s formula so addictive.

Combat is a toss-up between using a melee weapon, a ranged weapon, and psychic/mutant powers to ensure you escape seemingly-stacked odds. Throughout my playthrough, I found crafting each weapon to be a joy, and while the loot was rarely worth it, every upgrade mattered, with ranged weapons having more than a handful of things to improve and experiment with. While I typically stuck to a two-handed ranged barrage, some enemies were impervious to bullets and demanded I hack away at them while dodging and earning a smooth slo-mo on perfect dodges.

Across your adventure in Biomutant, your travels are narrated, albeit to a particularly-annoying extent. While there’s a slider in the options to turn down the frequency of the narrator, every single puzzle you solve and new location is accompanied by a copy/paste bit of dialogue that gets old fast. Thankfully, characters have enough interesting things to say to keep the player sane. It’s adorable how they make up their own words for what we call things, akin to Ariel in The Little Mermaid calling a fork a “dinglehopper”.

While deep-diving through Biomutant‘s world on new-gen, the framerate is a smooth 60 and looks stellar. The draw distance is a bit jarring and there’s some slowdown in busy areas, but it’s never to a major extent. I had an awesome time chugging along on my mount, zooming around with a dodge ability, sliding on my back down mountains with no fall damage, and more, as I found every nook and cranny in the diversified biomes across the game.

While some may tire of the monotony within Biomutant, it’s worth trudging through for those who love to complete an open world and do everything there is to do. Going into the game with tempered expectations for a small indie studio, instead of a polished AAA experience, you can have a great time with Biomutant. I managed to pick up a PS4 copy for >$10 earlier this year, so the free PS5 upgrade ensured I got my money’s worth. On sale, you could surely get yours with Biomutant, too.

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Biomutant

$39.99

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Varied Open World
• Satisfying Combat
• Charming Dialogue

Cons

• Narrator Never Shuts Up
• Tons of Useless Loot
• Copy/Paste Dungeons