BIOMUTANT

I am enjoying the combat the story and yes the endless narrator. This is exactly what i expected, watched plenty of content and i am not feeling i wasted my money. Good job devs some of us are loving it.

Extremely disappointed, don't expect furry Devil May Cry or Kingdoms of Amalur. -Mutant powers are mostly useless and uninteresting (jump pad mushroom spawner, bouncing snot bubble, ground pound, the ABILITY TO SLIDE DOWN HILLS. Literally!) There are only two that are useful: mind control and homing missiles. Everything else is situational, underwhelming, and pointless. -Specialization doesn't matter. You take 20 minutes figuring out how to customize your character at the start, wonder what does what, only to have the game go "yeah, nevermind". The ONLY thing you get that can't be unlocked otherwise is the Psi-Freak's starting power, which merely shoots a spark ball with no special anything (guns have unlimited ammo and reload quicker with more damage). -Magic abilities (separate from mutant powers) are very few and locked behind a morality wall (cool powers are only for the needlessly cruel, what kind of moral for kids which this is obviously aimed at?) and also suffer from a couple you will use, most need not apply. Can't get them for about 20-30 hours anyway. Totally unimaginative. -"I JUST want to play the damn game!" Tutorials come in ONCE, no reminders and you will have to look up guides if you miss something. And there are a bazillion tutorials. -REALLY CLUNKY MENU. All ~50+ pages of it, including submenus. -Swimming requires magic specialization. Not kidding. -Vehicles are exclusively area-locked, so forget using that Mech from the reveal videos. Pointless lying hype. -Pathetic character interaction. No voice acting with characters, who literally mumble nothing and are narrated by the same guy over and over. -Little combat. You can walk for 20 minutes and have nothing to fight. Boring. -Story = budget Kung Fu Panda - anything remotely interesting. Pick Elex, Amalur, Borderlands 2/3, DMC3, Elder Scrolls, or Just Cause 3 instead. 2 stars for visuals/effort, but hampered by nonsensical design decisions that severely hinder enjoyment.

I don't know what people were expecting from this game. I think it's kinda fun. For an open world game (I usually don't like these much, as they tend to drop the same gameplay elements in dozens on a map over and over again) it's pretty fun. The game world is nicely designed with some very nice vistas to take in. There's some build varietey (melee / ranged / PSI [= magic]), and you can craft stuff to your liking. There are specialized mounts for various purposes, you can also collect a variety of animals as mounts. The 'puzzles' are a joke, though. I have no idea who came up with this as a gameplay element, as even a 5 year old will do these perfectly without any teaching :P Combat is mostly on the easy side, which in this case I feel is a good thing, because it lets you focus more on the exploration. The game runs rock solid, no crash whatsoever. And while it was clearly designed for controllers (strong line red tape for me), it only took a couple of minutes to confiure the controls in a way that made it really comfortable to play with keyboard and mouse for me. I suggest not forcing your way through this in long sessions, but take it in bites. You also have additional control over the difficulty. If you do a lot of the side quests (a lot of which are just visiting specific locations) you'll be quite overpowered, but it's also possible to just follow the main story line. The narrator can be toned down, but still annoys from time to time. I set it to 0, and it did not bother me much, really. Sometimes he was funny, too :) It was clearly a budget decision as they would require only one voice actor instead of a whole bunch. Since I am taking my time, clearing everything with a 100% good aura, there's also replayability in the form of either going the 'bad' route (will try that on NG+) and/or changing the build. All in all it's a solid 4 of 5 stars for me. I keep thinking this could have easily been a 5/5 if they had more time/budget.

The good news first: the fighting mechanics are intuitive and fun enough right out of the gate, the graphics are as pretty as I'd expected from the screenshots, and it does have its requisite RPG elements. Unfortunately this is more than offset by a truckload of bad - what I've experienced of the backstory that was dumped on me one hour into the game reeks of black-and-white morality and a lazy attempt at creating an environmentally-friendly moral. To wit: The current state of the world apparently is due to an Evil Megacorporation (tm) they actually had the stones to name "Toxanol" - subtle! - somehow figuring it's a good idea to just leave nuclear waste lying around...but the main environmental hazard so far has been oil spills. I haven't seen much radiation at all. Who knows, it might have come later, though maybe the uranium all decayed into evil petrochemicals. Predators are bad. Apparently everyone's happy herbivores, or at least furry moeblobs, except for The Bad Guys. You literally get to choose your alignment at the start, and you have the choice of a squeaky, bubbly woman representing "light", and a snide, almost-witty man representing "dark". Your second moral choice: light, help a dude, or dark, leave him to die. You get your upgrade either way, it seems. Your third: go to the good tribe or the evil tribe. In fact, most choices seem to be binary in this game, I've not yet encountered a meaningful dialogue giving me a third option. If this keeps up, and I've seen no sign of it stopping, I'm going to have to refund this. The writing is just plain unworthy of a story-driven game, and the environmental issues it attempts to touch (whether out of genuine concern or in an attempt at being relevant) are handled spectacularly poorly.

The fun combat, some quirky character and a gorgeous environment, has a big flaw. Boring repetative quests. [NPC] asks you to fetch an item from another [NPC], which in turn asks you to kill some monsters and also fetch an item, before giving you the initial item you were supposed to fetch... All this requiring you to run by foot or mount for 10-30 minutes into the vast open world.