Stellaris BioGenesis review: There are bugs in my bugs

The BioGenesis DLC for Stellaris fulfilled a little dream of mine: I’ve always wanted to stomp a galaxy with the Yuuzhan Vong, a grimdark alien species from the pre-Disney Star Wars canon. Many fans hated the Vong and their immunity to the Force, their biotechnology, and their edge — but growing up with the books featuring them, I came to love them as the antagonists. Sadly, they never made it into any video game and most space strategy titles don’t offer the customization necessary to build something like them. Until now, that is.

BioGenesis adds living, biological ships, stations, and cities to Stellaris, which is one of the key characteristics I’m looking for to build the Yuuzhan Vong. Thanks to the additional species traits and the new Ascension Paths – Cloning, Purity, and Mutation – it’s actually possible to create a pretty good simulacrum to the Yuuzhan Vong in Stellaris now and dominate the stars to honor their bloodthirsty gods. You can even create a massive leviathan that becomes the end game crisis, mimicking some of the wild creations that the Vong use in battle. Or – and this might be the best aspect of the expansion – start the game as a sapient planet like the Vong’s lost home world and its offspring, Zonama Sekot.

That’s not the only sci-fi fantasy this DLC enables, of course. Combine the new biotech with a hivemind and you’ve got something that resembles the Zerg or the Tyranids — not that they are interested in building cities and having an economy and so on. You’d also need to get hiveminds to actually work properly, which has been a problem for a while now. And that brings me to the massive, glaring issue with Stellaris BioGenesis: It was released alongside a clearly unfinished update. There are so many bugs in my bugs, I hardly know if the things happening in my game are actually down to me being a terrible Supreme Overlord or are simply dysfunctional.

The developers have been addressing these problems with several hotfixes, but the fact that it takes daily updates with dozens of items on the agenda to get the game into a playable state following this DLC release is hardly something that goes without notice.

Here’s the dilemma for reviewers like me and fans alike for a case like this: The content in this expansion is fantastic. I love the additional options for playing and role-playing and the amount of flavor it brings, similar to the superb Grand Archive or Machine Age DLCs. However, I can’t enjoy all of that without having to play on the buggy patch it’s accompanied by. So while there should technically be a distinction between BioGenesis, the DLC, and Stellaris 4.0, the update, the practical reality is that there is no such difference for players at release and that, naturally, leads to the expansion getting all the flak.

For this review, we’re looking at what BioGenesis has to offer — we’re ignoring the noise around it and the massive changes and issues introduced by the Phoenix update (which is not all bad either, as an aside).

I mentioned the Wilderness Origin already, which lets you start as a planet with a consciousness and switches up some of the game’s essential mechanics, from the resources you need over the way you exploit worlds to how colonization works. The latter is especially fun, as you send out a part of your consciousness on stellar spores to take over additional worlds, making them a part of yourself. Literally.

That’s also a feature in the second new Origin, Evolutionary Predators, which is the one I would heartily recommend to any Zerg or Tyranid fans out there. You basically go out and eat stuff and absorb its genes to evolve your own stuff into even stronger predators — and all the shiny new traits BioGenesis offers are essentially being introduced to feed into this playstyle. Feed. Hehe, get it?

Seriously, this Origin alone is worth picking BioGenesis up for, because it enables you to go for so many different play styles that you won’t have to make the same move twice in the game for the entire year. For example, while you can ravage the galaxy as a Zerg-equivalent species, it’s possible to appear a bit more civilized and benevolent, protecting other species in return for the monthly DNA Tithe. You could also use espionage to steal genes, like some sort of Genestealer. Okay, all of that is still pretty evil.

There is the Starlit Citadel Origin as well, which starts you off with the new Deep Space Citadel megastructure and a portal for an extra wonky beginning. Suffice to say, if you’re looking to mix your next playthrough up, BioGenesis has the options.

Perfect for all those evolving species is the introduction of dynamic leader avatars that evolve over time as well, changing their looks as they collect experience and level up. BioGenesis is adding new music, visual assets, and 65 events to the game as well.

As if that wasn’t enough yet to make the flavor more meaty, the three new Ascension Paths mentioned above all offer greater flexibility than usual, having only some fixed bonuses and letting players customize their perk picks to a degree. That really fits the whole mutation and evolution angle.

My only regret is that not all of the game’s megastructures have organic counterparts, so if you construct the Grand Archive as a species using biotechnology, you will still get the regular metal model instead of a suitably terrifying meatsack of cosmic proportions. That somewhat ruins my Yuuzhan Vong roleplay, because they absolutely hate metal structures.

Looking at Stellaris BioGenesis in a vacuum, it’s one the best-ever expansions released for the game, though still quite expensive when you consider the fact that you need other DLCs to get the most out of some of its offerings. This one will grow on people once the stardust over its launch controversy has settled and everyone has calmed down a bit.

More reviews on DBLTAP: