Biogun PC review – Dogsmosis Jones

I play a lot of Metroidvanias, but they often make me feel like Goldilocks. “This one’s too short, this one doesn’t have enough exploration, this one doesn’t have good mobility options” are common thoughts while playing them. Biogun is one of the rare ones where everything is much closer to being juuuuuust right overall. I ran into a fair amount of bugs and I have an issue with the difficulty curve (or lack thereof,) but the game is easily one of the best of its ilk that does a great job of standing out in a crowded marketplace.

A global epidemic is infecting dogs left and right. It’s known as the Dooper Virus and is seemingly unstoppable. Until now! You play as Bek, a vaccine that’s been injected into a certain doctor’s dog. Bek’s mission is simple – he’s to track down and eliminate the viruses within the dog and save them from certain doom. Despite the fact there’s only a single human character, there’s a fair bit of dialogue here. The doctor is voice acted in full English, while the rest of the microscopic organisms that make up the cast either aren’t voiced, or make noises or spout gibberish. It’s a cute choice.

The game’s structure is centred around defeating three powerful viruses in order to find and destroy the main virus. You can technically destroy these three viruses in any order, but most players are sure to find a specific one first, so it’s really choosing either or. Other than that, you’re free to come and go as you please, as there are tons of things to find in classic Metroidvania fashion. Since you’re a vaccine in a dog, all of the game’s areas are actually different organs, which is very awesome. You’ll be fighting through the heart, lungs, and more as you work to save the day.

Biogun is highly influenced by Metroid as well as Hollow Knight. There is a corpse run mechanic, but you drop your ability to heal instead of currency. But you can get this ability back by finding green enzymes, so I didn’t even notice it much of the time. Not that I died much beyond a certain point, mind you. Like Hollow Knight, enemy attacks usually do a single unit of damage. Dealing damage yourself gives you atomic energy that you can use for your stronger weapons or for healing. Very much unlike that game, though, Biogun is a twin stick shooter. You’ll find gun mods that have different stats and characteristics. I preferred short-range, highly damaging shots, but you can find the inverse. There’s even a sort of grenade gun.

More powerful weapons are typically found after beating bosses and include a strong machine gun, a sniper rifle, a shotgun, and a rocket launcher. Bek can also dash forward quickly by default, which works well and has practically no cooldown. The combat and movement feel terrific and are among the best in the genre. There are some fairly challenging platforming sections in Biogun, although one shouldn’t expect anything similar to, say, Hollow Knight’s Path of Pain. But I was pleased with the general difficulty of these sections. Although two of them (an optional one similar to the barrel sections in Donkey Kong Country and a truly awful forced stealth section that sees you avoiding lasers) really got on my nerves. The latter was especially miserable and was easily the game’s low point.

Your map fills in as you explore, but entering a room will fill in the entire thing, so it isn’t as specific as you might be hoping. On the other hand, you’ve got markers that you can put down, although using the controller to do this is kind of hard, as the map control isn’t sensitive enough. Plus, it’s easy to run out of markers if you don’t make a habit of going back and cleaning them up. Then again, there are mapping stations that will highlight all collectibles and bosses on the map for you, so you don’t actually have to worry about this if you don’t want to. Warp stations are abound too and use a clever, unique in-game explanation.

You’ll often find green objects while exploring. Collecting three will give you a choice of an additional hit point or atomic energy chunk. Healing and firing most of the strong weapons in Biogun uses up a single atomic energy chunk, so upgrading this is extremely helpful. You can even respec if you use one of the objects needed to utilise the mapping stations at a specific NPC. You’ll also find cosmetics around (I stuck with the Mega Man X-inspired helmet for most of the game because of course I did,) as well as new chips and gun mods.

Chips are especially useful. You can equip a single one and make the game significantly easier. One chip lets you simply warp back to the room you died in from any save point, but my most-used one doubled the amount of atomic energy from attacks, which resulted in letting me heal twice as often. Of course, this made the game much, much easier. Not that it’s all that difficult to begin with, outside a couple of massive difficulty spikes.

An early game boss, for instance, is incredibly overkitted. It’s the hardest fight in the game, (harder than the final boss even) and the player gets locked into the area until they’re able to beat it. In the event you want to explore to have more health or different chips, you can’t. It’s a fairly bad choice. The devs have said that it was necessary to do this, as the player will need to be able to have the skills to best them to even think about fighting what comes next, but I don’t at all agree with this assessment, as successive bosses just weren’t all that difficult to begin with.

It’s things like this that really mess up the difficulty curve. Truthfully, though, I rarely died outside of the above-mentioned boss fight and obnoxious forced stealth section. Granted, these games don’t need to be hard, but I wish there were difficulty modes or options to make gameplay tougher, outside of a chip that greatly increases your damage in exchange for letting you take a single hit. At least there are a healthy amount of sidequests to sink your teeth into. Additionally, you get a scan ability that eventually lets you upgrade the game’s best gun mod which just absolutely lets you steamroll everything.

Another aspect I disliked about Biogun is that, once you defeat the third super virus, you just go straight to the last boss. I wish there had been one final area that required players to make use of everything they’d learned, but instead you just have the final fight and that’s it. It’s more than a little anticlimactic. At least the game’s a decent length. It took me about 13 hours to beat, but takes another hour or so to 100%. That’s truly the Goldilocks length for Metroidvanias for me. Not so short that I feel like I didn’t get enough out of it and not so long that it feels bloated and empty.

I do have to mention the bugs, though. I found quite a few while playing, including one that lost me a fair amount of progress (although that was partially due to me failing to find an obvious save point.) I’d wager there are still many left to find, but the devs are pretty fantastic about fixing them. They seriously often patch them up within hours of becoming aware of their existence. Still, finding yet another bug while exploring and having a great time is annoying, as are the crashes I’d get from time-to-time. Biogun was developed in a browser-based engine and that leads to some extra issues that I wish weren’t around.

Despite this, I can’t deny that Biogun is one of the best Metroidvanias I’ve played in recent memory, as I had a ton of fun with it. In fact, it’s up there with Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown as the best ones of the year, even eclipsing it in some ways. If you like Metroidvanias and don’t need a high level of challenge, this game is a must-play, especially once even more of the bugs are ironed out.

More of our latest reviews:

Creatures of Ava PC review – A beautiful world marred by jank | Tomba! Special Edition PC review – Hey, pig | Mars 2120 PC review – Not done terraforming |