Biomutant
Developer Experiment 101
Publisher THQ Nordic
Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One
Release Out now
The thought comes every so often as we explore Biomutant’s verdant wasteland. Knowing that its open world –a few square miles rich with jungle, marsh and scrubland – is the work of a remarkably small team, our mind occasionally wanders away from the fluttering vegetation underfoot, the pylons that jut out of the landscape, and turns instead to its creation. And the thought is always this: the decision-makers at Experiment 101 must surely be immune to the word ‘no’.
We are talking, after all, about a game in which a rodent martial artist and their robotic grasshopper companion battle furry kaiju in a post-human world. Like the last time the planet’s ruling species were wiped out, it’s the smaller mammals that step up, their evolution accelerated by the very same pollution that spelled mankind’s end. Now, thanks to four world-eating monsters, this post-apocalypse is facing a cataclysm of its own, which you can attempt to prevent or help bring about. There’s a certain manic energy to that premise, a mash of concepts that don’t obviously fit together, and the same is true of the game itself.