Biomutant is a strange game, but its value isn’t derived from its tendency to submerge itself in affable weirdness; instead, this is a platform for major highs and lows that could clarify the things you like and dislike in gaming even if you’ve never taken a moment to consider what those might be. It’s a stunning success Story and a cautionary tale about feature creep and the prioritization of more content over polishing the basics. Biomutant is briskly paced but also a drag at certain points. It’s frequently overwhelming and somehow deceptively simple. Most of the time, it exists in this superposition of contradictory states where its successes and failures coexist and commingle, which lends an undeniably singular quality to a game that, at a glance, doesn’t stray too far from the open-world mold. I haven’t played anything quite like Biomutant before and neither have you. Not everyone will be able to look past the price tag and a parade of minor flaws to appreciate that uniqueness. Regardless, I’m glad that this exists.
Biomutant‘s story is its biggest weakness because of its penchant for telling, not showing
The setup is that humans destroyed the world with chemicals and fled to other worlds when the planet became uninhabitable, leaving the wildlife they left behind to adapt to the pollution and eventually form their own society of intelligent creatures. This is revealed to you toward the beginning of Biomutant, and while you can learn some tiny additional details by interacting with the posters you sometimes see on walls, most of the time doing so just gives the narrator an excuse to say the same things over again. The narrator is the worst part of the game because he refuses to shut up. It wasn’t until around 7 hours into the game (which I finished in 12) that a popup mentioned that there was a slider that reduced the frequency of his comments, and even then, cranking it down to zero didn’t shut down his comments entirely. He rarely has anything worthwhile to say, either.
“That’s enough electric current to initiate the actuators and activate the framework” is a line you’ll hear almost every time you finish a puzzle to turn the power back on somewhere, and it’s essentially word salad in this context. Biomutant‘s narrator is a reflection of its poor writing, finding frequent excuses to vomit bromidic platitudes at you and ramble about morality in childish terms. He’ll interrupt your wandering to say things about how the story can be as interesting as you want it to be and other gratingly obvious observations. He’s exhausting.
Worse still, none of the world’s characters have voices of their own.
They chitter away in their animal languages, sure, but the corresponding words are subsequently relayed to you by the narrator, meaning that every character shares his voice. He doesn’t directly translate anything, either, instead giving you the gist of what they said, which quickly turns conversations into barely coherent salvos of nonsense.
One potentially cute aspect of Biomutant is how the human names for everything have been lost, forcing the creatures to rename everything. A similar thing has happened with enemies, with everyone agreeing to give them adorable names like “Huff Puff” as a sign of disrespect (or something). In practice, however, that means listening to the narrator say things like “make the Googlide strong enough to fight the Porky Puff.” Listening to a bunch of made-up words strung together in conversations that you’re having through a translator in a game prone to wading into moralizing metaphors doesn’t work. It’s impossible to care about the characters or world because you’re not directly interacting with them and picking up on the things that make them unique. Even at its best, every conversation has the narrative weight of listening to a friend complain about a coworker.
However, I do appreciate the moments where something totally unexpected happened
Biomutant was perilously close to a 0/3 in the story department, but I decided to give it a 1/3 largely owing to one moment where my expectations were pleasantly subverted. What had happened was that I was conquering rival factions with the warlike tribe I had decided to join, and it was starting to get a bit stale. I had conquered one faction entirely and executed its leader, and seizing the second faction’s bases was pretty much the same thing in a different location. Once I finally executed that second leader, however, my tribe leader mentioned that the other factions were terrified of all of the executions and that it’d be possible to end the war against all of them automatically. I chose that option and saved myself a lot of repetition, which was great. That’s one of many examples of something weird saving questionable quest design. One of several fetch quests ends with you being able to ride a giant mechanical hand that’s also a gun. Bizarre discoveries like this help to dull the pain of Biomutant‘s terrible story.
It takes a while to get there, but Biomutant‘s gameplay eventually becomes enjoyable
My first couple of hours with Biomutant were so uncomfortable and random-seeming that I was unconvinced that it’d ever find its footing. Color me surprised; around hour 6, everything began to click and it was finally possible to enjoy the game for what it was. Biomutant is an action-RPG at heart, kind of feeling like a looser take on Jade Empire with some third-person gunplay thrown in for good measure. And of course, all of this is then transplanted into an open world, which is where Biomutant truly shines. Honestly, I could have finished the game faster than I did, but I kept getting distracted running across its lush landscapes and letting quests and sidequests direct me to new areas. The fast walking/running speed of my character and the lush world reminded me of running around in Okami and Ghost of Tsushima, taking in the sights and seeing where the road leads.
I played Biomutant on the normal difficulty, as always, and the floaty combat made melee attacks and dodges difficult to time. However, I invested my first 24 level-up stat upgrades into strength, and this allowed me to carve through groups of enemies very quickly. I’ve seen some players claim that Biomutant‘s enemies are damage sponges. As the embedded videos will attest, my experience was very different.
One of the main reasons investing heavily in one stat to the exclusion of all others is viable is because of Biomutant‘s crafting/upgrade system. As you explore, you’re constantly finding new items and components that can be used either to enhance your clothing and weapons or craft new ones from scratch, and stacking powerful upgrades onto an already powerful piece of gear can give you a piece of equipment that you’ll be able to use for several hours (if not the rest of the game). Upgrading my various pieces of equipment allowed me to tank enough hits that I could focus 100% on offense during most fights. Needless to say, this speeds up the pace of the game considerably and further mitigates the frustrations that arise from the combat’s floaty nature.
Pieces of equipment also tend to grant you a certain amount of resistance to Biomutant‘s five hazardous biome types. These are areas filled with various types of radiation, poison, or dangerously extreme temperatures, and while you can finish a slow sidequest to find specialized equipment to resist one type at a time, you can also combine the resistances of normal clothes to help you hit 100% immunity. Defeating certain enemies and finding certain canisters also offers you points that can be spent upgrading your natural resistances, making it easier to hit that crucial 100% resistance using the regular equipment that you’ve accumulated. I enjoy having that type of flexibility instead of being forced to find specific gear.
The gameplay suffers from numerous rough edges and frustrating gimmicks, though
I was getting tutorial popups even as my time with Biomutant was winding down, and this is usually a giant red flag—if you need to explain a new mechanic at the end of the game, you should probably ask yourself if it needed to be included in the first place. The four main boss fights are a perfect example of this; you spend all of your time settling into a playstyle that suits you, only for the game to go, “actually, we’re going to have you fight this thing in a mech.” No, really. Another boss is fought in a submarine. A third on horseback. The final one is fought while piloting a speedboat. In three of those cases, you’re unable to use melee attacks at all, and even the lone exception doesn’t allow you to use your normal weapons and combos. Suddenly finding yourself at the mercy of whatever ranged weapon you have equipped can be maddening if you haven’t been using guns.
And while I’m complaining about things, I might as well mention the way many sidequests tend to become your currently tracked quest, forcing you to go into the journal and switch back to the quest you were initially tracking. Most of these quests ask you to hold a button if you want it to become the one you’re tracking, but it either lasts so long that I kept hitting it accidentally or lost its sense of politeness and started forcing it. There’s no obvious way to shorten the prompt.
And sometimes things just don’t work the way you expect them to. When I obtained a boat that could be summoned through a menu, I thought that it’d spawn at any body of water. While experimenting with this, though, I fell into the water and realized that it could only be spawned in very specific areas. At that point, I was too far from the shore to reach it before my energy fully depleted and I drowned.
Biomutant‘s colorful visual design gives many of its areas a strong sense of place
As a reminder, I judge visuals based on their artistry, not fidelity, and while the main reason for that is to allow me to fairly critique older games without giving a 0/2 to everything before 2015, it also helps games like Biomutant that have a strong visual identity and a slight lack of polish.
Fidelity-wise, I could bemoan the game’s ugly (and mercifully optional) depth of field effect, which is perhaps best described as a “dear god why” blur filter, but that’s ultimately a meaningless detail. Biomutant‘s depth of field is the kind of thing you’ll quickly stop seeing, while its overwhelmingly colorful and carefully designed world will have you stopping to take in all of the little details. I can’t recall a game world more entertaining to traipse around in than Biomutant‘s. The fast movement speed means that you never have to wander around long before stumbling across something amazing, whether that be old-world signage that looks incredible as dusk approaches or the striking contrast between the reddish mountains and vibrant green grass that grows toward their base. Lens flares dance across the screen as the sun rises through foliage. Pollution effects color areas bright purple, green, red, and blue. It’s all just pretty. So much so that I was shocked that I could get a mostly stable frame rate at 4K with my RX 580.
Finally, there’s the soundtrack. If I hadn’t recorded video, I could have been convinced that Biomutant doesn’t have a soundtrack. There’s just something about orchestral fluff (overexposure, probably) that goes in one ear and out another, and when you combine the verbose narrator with an indistinct soundtrack that’s approximately a thousand decibels quieter than his assault of random platitudes that you can’t escape, it becomes even harder to register. On the bright side, there was no point where the music became a negative, either. Besides, it’s not like the story has anything for the soundtrack to latch onto and help to reinforce musically. I can’t even imagine what it was like to ask questions about scenes while scoring this.
Story: 1/3 Gameplay: 2/3 Visuals: 2/2 Music: 1/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean
*A Steam key was provided for this Biomutant review. It took me 12 hours to beat the game, though I sped a bunch of main quest things up quite a bit by killing my rival factions until the rest surrendered.
Biomutant review – A flawed gem of unabashed weirdness first appeared on Killa Penguin
