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Jon Bailes is a freelance games journalist and author of Ideology and the Virtual City: Videogames, Power Fantasies and Neoliberalism.

Today sees the release of Biomutant, the long-awaited RPG offering developed by Swedish studio Experiment 101 and published under THQ Nordic. Experiment's debut title was unveiled at Gamescom 2017 as an ambitious open-world action game. The studio itself was set up two years prior by ex-Avalanche Studio employees that had previously worked on the Just Cause franchise. Biomutant is set in an open-world environment struck by a natural disaster, which the game's protagonist is tasked with cleaning up. Despite world-ending circumstances, the landscape is populated by anthropomorphic mammals that...

Among the industry's major publishers, Bandai Namco may be the most inconsistent in terms of the critical reception of its games -- if not across its entire history, then certainly in the last few years. If you exclude re-releases and remasters of older titles, the last Bandai Namco product to reach a Metacritic average of 80 was Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown in January 2019. If you narrow that to its more Western-facing games, the track record is patchier still, with its biggest critical success of the last three years being Digixart's 11-11: Memories Retold, which got a Metacritic average of...