Biomutant (2021)

I need to stop completing the side tasks / quests. I'm 16 hours in, but only 33% completed according to the PS5 home screen.

It's also frustrating me how many types there are. Every time I go to a new area/building, "oh look! That's an old timey whimey jingle jangle. Why don't you see what it does?" 🤦

On the other hand, as they're mindless and simple, it's a nice way for my brain to switch off at the end of the day.

So, I am finally playing this after I found it at a lower price and... there's a lot to unpack here. First things first, this game is objectively and undeniably bad. That's not to say I would not recommend it. It has some good fun and I have been playing it for longer than I expected.

But I guess to help people decide on whether to buy it or not I will detail this review further. In fact, this is the kind of game that makes it so easy to understand what works and what doesn't in a game. Because it has a lot going on.

Story

Don't worry, I will try not to spoil anything. But there's nothing to spoil here really. The story is by all means the worst aspect of this game and is not explained further than what you get at the first few hours. I don't know what the problem was, maybe they changed the story multiple times over the development, maybe it would not fit the gameplay, or maybe they just had no one qualified to write the story. It is very incomplete.

The story is full of tropes: the mystical orient, the amnesiac protagonist, the nature is good and industry is bad. While all of those can work, they don't here. Starting with the amnesiac protagonist. This is often used to make it easier to introduce the world to the player as it is reintroduced to the protagonist. It is cheap and overused, but it works. Or it would work if the game bothered to reintroduce it to the protagonist. But there's a lot the game doesn't say. Where was the protagonist before the beginning of the game? They were just... outside the playable area and even they don't seem to know. When did they lose their memory and why? I though it was after the only specified incident in their childhood, but the dialogue with one of the NPCs mention the protagonist did still live with them after the incident for an unknown amount of time, and yet they could not remember this NPC? Its so weird that every major NPC (and even unnamed NPCs) knew you as a child.

And spoiler alert because some might qualify it as one even though it is something you see in the first 2 hours: did the protagonist nonchalantly plant THE life tree as a child? If that's the case, it is shown to be a very trivial thing and it's not clear why it's so important to save it since it can be easily done by anyone and life existed before it. And why is the life tree being destroyed by the worldeaters in the first place? It is mentioned that they appeared because of the pollution, but the pollution was created at the human time and originated all the current life-forms a long time ago. So why is the world ending a second time now when it had clearly recovered and there's no new sources of pollution?

So, yeah, the story is a mess...

Battles

Now for a good aspect of the game. The battle mechanics are not the best I have seen, and they can be a bit unpolished and unbalanced. But the way you progress through melee, ranged and abilities is different and makes it more flexible since they don't need to conflict too much leveling up. You also don't have to be that good or highly optimize your gear. I have been able to use a very non-optimized clothing with no problem in battles just because I wanted the one that looked better even though it had half the armor of the other ones. I just wish they added more variations in combos and abilities.

Exploration

Another good aspect of this game. I found it fun to explore the world. They did manage to make it a very charming and even varied world despite the unpolished textures. The hazardous regions don't make a lot of sense, like small open regions that are somehow extra hot or cold or an entire region that doesn't have oxygen even though it's open and abandoned dilapidated buildings in this region can have oxygen inside. This only really makes sense for the radioactive and polluted regions to be contained to specific regions. But despite this, it is still charming and fun to explore.

Crafting

Because yes, of course they added crafting. In fact it is the only way to buy new weapons: you buy parts and craft them yourself. It works just fine. My only complaint is that it is too silly. Most of the parts are literal garbage. This is another theme of the game: upcycling. I get it, and I am all for upcycling. But you don't have to leave things rusty and dirty just because you are upcycling. The smiths in the game have literal forges but you don't buy reforged metal, you buy scrapped, rusty and often broken metal blades. Also, you can use a banana for a handle and a toilet scrubber as a blunt weapon... this game has a tone problem.

Binary morality

I though we all agreed this mechanic should be left to the PS3/Xbox 360 era. The way it is implemented is not a big deal to me, since it only affects who is willing to ally with you and very few powers. It is not game-changing, but it is annoying. People often complain about the narrator, but I somehow tolerate it. What is really annoying is having every dialogue stop when I make a light vs dark decision so that the inner angel and demon can have their little exchange... I am not kidding, you have an inner angel and demon and they will appear every single time you make a moral decision to mock each other. It's three to five lines of dialogue every time.

Narrator

Speaking of the narrator. You have one. People hate it. I get it, it is a strange decision. But somehow I feel that its this game's THING. At this point I cannot play biomutant without the narrator (there's an added option to remove the narration). I won't deny it took me some time to get used to it, tho. But it was weird not having it on since the creatures talk in gibberish and are translated by the narrator. If you remove the narrator the dialogue is still just the subtitle for that narration and it feels off.

World building

While not complex, I have a lot of praise for one aspect of the world building: the vocabulary. It is often ignored that a non-human sentient being would have its own way of naming the world around them. They made an entire new vocabulary that is actually easy to understand. New words for mom and dad, often descriptive ways to name your gear, basing much of their naming of objects on the sound or most pronounced aspect of it. It is charming, and make the creatures less human-like.

Last considerations

The game is meant for a very young audience... I think. I actually did not have this impression looking at the trailers, but playing this game it does make me feel like that was their goal. That would explain the silliness and weird decisions such as including the narrator, the angel and demon, the reductionist view of nature vs industry, and the tone problems.

TL/DR.: It is an objectively bad game, full of strange decisions, but it has a lot of charm and can be very fun to play. Just a heads-up, on the base PS4 the frame rate drops frequently.

There are a lot of game design decisions in Biomutant that left me scratching my head. Character progression was off, with too many upgrades for powerful playstyles and not enough for weaker ones. Loot progression was mishandled -- I only ended up finding 2-3 upgrades on the weapon type I liked in the 25 hours I played. Assets were blatantly and distractingly copied and pasted across zones in many occasions. The combat could be clunky at times, and the balance was just off between melee and ranged weapons. The story line was also very minimal.

Despite all of that, I had a great time with Biomutant. The environments were gorgeous, and the world was fun to explore. The character and creature designs were unique and endearing. Despite being clunky at times, the combat was overall very fun, allowing you to combo gun and melee and pepper in psionic and mutagenic abilities. The storyline and characters were charming. The various mounts and vehicles were particularly enjoyable ways to traverse the landscapes.

I think Biomutant shares a similar fate to the original Fable -- it promised a world of innovation, but only delivered a charming action RPG with a few gimmicks. I'm fine with that. I wish the systems were a bit more fleshed out and impactful, but in the end, I enjoyed myself and the game put a smile on my face.

I'm giving Biomutant a 4/5. Most of the individual components of Biomutant were 2/5 or maybe 3/5, but, for me, it just came together to be an all around good time despite its shortcomings. A game only needs to do a couple of things really well, as long as its mediocre aspects don't detract too heavily from the experience. Biomutant nailed the atmosphere and environments, while delivering plenty of fun along the way.

So I'd had this on my (rather extensive) Steam wish list from fairly early in development, and mostly lost interest after seeing its reception on release. I forgot to take it off my list, and my brother bought it for me as a Christmas gift.

Turns out, despite all of the issues, I'm having a great time with it so far. The combat is good enough and has enough variety in abilities that I'm having fun messing around with it. The environments are absolutely gorgeous, and I love the art design of the creatures. Mechs, goats, and jet skis are all fun to ride. There's some copy and paste area design here and there that's a bit too noticeable. The cutscens are also a bit... abrupt at times, and don't quite flow right. I don't find any of that too bothersome, though. The main concern I have right now is that there is too much filler in the game and I'll get tired of the atmosphere/goofing around in combat before the game ends, so I'll probably skipping a good portion of the side content from here on out.

So yeah, glad I forgot Biomutant on my wishlist.

Played during free trial on Hard but did not get very far because it ended before my days off work. I played as the default race that looks like a fox, and colored the fur purple. Chose sentinel class and vitality as my main stat, with str second. I wanted to make my animal look like a cat. The whole animal concept of this game was weird. Before playing, I thought it would be about humans experimenting with genetic engineering on small animals to make some kind of bioweapon super solider. How else would you explain weirdly humanoid small animals using guns, swords and magic powers while flipping around like an acrobat? But no that is not the story, and I feel the game would have been the same with robots or humans or aliens or whatever. I got Light points and joined the Myriad good faction, even though they look lame in their robes and turbans compared to the samurai closed fist faction. I put all my resist points into cold, got the area attack for blunt, increased loot chance, increased clip size, mind control and blink. Melee is definitely the way to go with controller aiming and lack of lock on being less than ideal for shooting. I liked how blunt weapons can knock down small enemies, and the effective dodges; especially the fluid animation for dodging between the legs of the big guys. For some of the bigger minibosses I stayed at range with gun. I didn't quite get the hang of block timing yet and I did not like spending upgrade points to learn new moves that require button input combos. I groaned when I looked at the move list and was very disincentivized to spend points on moves instead of passives. But the area attack looked effective and was simple X X Y. That was the only move I bothered to learn how to perform. Many of the moves, powers and magic seemed of dubious value. I got to about level 7 and explored brick town, submarine base and a friendly outpost that was on fire. I scrounged whatever armor I found and thought my cat looked like a total goober going around with a seemingly wooden mask I found in a washing machine. I crafted new weapons after finding some sweet parts; a light stone axe with hp restore on kill, and a clusterbomb shotgun with corrosive. The only time I died was twice from falling off a tight rope.

The game reminds me a lot of the Fable series; similar combat, duality, childlike tone, and themes. I was getting distinct Fallout feels from exploring the post apocalyptic world and looting random junk. And add in the generic open world that so many games have. I did find a couple hidden loot caches but more often there was nothing to find for exploring off the beaten path and trying to jump to difficult to reach places. I can't believe they used voice acted gibberish for dialogue, and then having the narrator translate. What a waste of development resources. Just have the animals speak normally. My first impressions were fairly good and I would give it somewhere in the 7/10 range. I would have to beat the game to know for sure. Probably not going to buy it unless it goes to $5 or cheaper but it does seem like a fun enough experience.

I really wanted to love Biomutant. I really did. When it was first announced it seemed to tick all the boxes for an open world adventure game that I would love. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite make the mark.

In Biomutant, you are a small humanoid-ish creature who is trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic Earth, where humans had destroyed the ecosystem, causing creatures to mutate. While the humans are long gone, as long as the ‘Tree of Life’ continues to thrive, all other life on Earth is safe...ish. Unfortunately, four giant creatures, called World Eaters, have decided to go vegetarian and the tree’s roots are their new favourite snack. This is where you come in. You are tasked with tracking down each of these World Eaters and killing them but, in order to do that, you must unite the various tribes to work together to face this threat.

On the surface the plot seems pretty solid. Sure, it is your standard travel-the-world-and-hunt-down-the-threat story but it does the trick. Unfortunately, Biomutant suffers from the usual open world game issue, in which the story does take a backseat to the exploration. In fact, aside from the first couple of hours of the game setting up the story, you don’t get much more added to the story after that. It is essentially the excuse for your character to go and explore the world.

There is a side story which is tied to your past and the fate of your parents. I’ll be honest I wished the developers at Experiment 101 had spent a bit more time on this storyline, as I felt it had the potential to make Biomutant stand out amongst the other open world games. This part of the game also explained what happened to cause the tribes to separate, as well as giving your character an antagonist to oppose. Unfortunately, this whole storyline is introduced at the very beginning and is pretty much forgotten about until the very end; which is a shame, as this could have helped players feel more connected to Biomutant’s world and more invested in saving it.

Speaking of the world of Biomutant, I feel like this is the game’s strongest point. The world is bright and colourful- a complete contrast to other post-apocalyptic games out there. Not only that, but the variety in its environments make it a joy to explore. The game has a range of different environments, ranging from desert to swampland. One of the aspects I really liked was if you went to either a hot or cold area, you had to either have a high enough resistance or wear the right clothes, as you will suffer damage otherwise.There are some assets that are clearly used multiple times but I think for a small development, I think that is OK. The map size is, I feel, the perfect size. It is large enough to justify the term ‘open-world’ but not too large that the world feels empty. At least for myself, the exploration was the best part of the game.

The combat was OK. It wasn’t the best combat I have experienced but it wasn’t the worst. For combat, there are a number of different aspects to it. Firstly, there is the classic melee and ranged combat. For the most part this was OK. You have various combos you can use, which if done successfully gives you the opportunity to use a ‘super’ mode. I didn’t like the lack of control I had on targeting enemies when using ranged weapons. Then there are the mutations. Throughout the game there are bio thingies which you can use to unlock mutations that give you abilities like a bubble which you can stick enemies to. These felt a little gimmicky. Then there are psi powers, which are tied to the karma system. Depending on your karma, you can unlock different powers, like shooting electricity out of your hands. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really use the mutations or psi powers, as the melee was all I really needed. It feels like the developers had several ideas of what they wanted the combat to be- combo focussed, as well as ability focussed and couldn’t decide on which they would go with. This leads to all of the combat systems not being fleshed out. In fact, I had maxed out the skill lines around the same time I reached the half-way point in the game.

The combat could have been much improved if the enemies were a bit more challenging. Basically, if it is a big creature: it will charge you, you will dodge and then hit it. Rinse and repeat. If it is a small creature: it will try and attack you, you will counter the attack and then hit it. Rinse and repeat. There are some variations, such as the small flying enemies but they are few and far between. In fact, the best fights are against the World Eaters, in which you have to use different tactics to take on each one. If there had been a little less repetition with the enemies, this would have gone a long way in making Biomutant a strong open world game.

Finally, we have come to, probably the most divisive part of Biomutant, sound design and voice acting. The developers decided that for the game there would only be three characters that actually speak human: the Narrator, the good karma angel thing and the bad karma devil thing. The two karma entities are brilliant. They remind me of the advisors in the Black & White games. However the Narrator is a little irritating. The voice actor does a brilliant job but the Narrator’s dialogue gets repetitive and dull. At some points, the Narrator was just uttering gibberish that did not reflect what was currently going on in the game. It felt like he had read a whole lot of fortune cookie fortunes and decided to impart his new found knowledge on the player. This wouldn’t be too bad if there were other characters you could speak to. However the developers decided everyone else was going to talk in their own Sim-like language. I completely understand the design choice, after all it does make sense that these creatures would have their own language; but if you are playing this game for thirty plus hours, this nonsensical dialogue can start to grate. In the end, I started to listen to podcasts and music, rather than listen to the game.

Overall, Biomutant was an ambitious game. It is clear that the developers had the best intentions and wanted to create the best open world game possible. However, I feel like their ambition got the better of them which leaves the game lacking a strong strong or combat system. It is not the worst open world game, not by a long shot but it certainly isn’t one of the best. I would definitely be interested in what Experiment 101 creates next but as for Biomutant, I would only recommend it to open world fans or if it was selling at around £30-£35.

I'm still "chasing the dragon" of the highs I felt playing open world games like Far Cry 3, Horizon Zero Dawn and, of course, Zelda: Breath of The Wild. Maybe I'm now tired of the tropes of the genre, but I'm getting bored easily with games like AC: Valhalla and other Far Cry.

I thought a game made by an small team could be the remedy for my problem, but it wasn't. Biomutant looks pretty and its map has a great design, but in the end is just more of the same. Same kind of optional quests, same boring puzzles, same progression cliches, same randomized loot. There are a few good ideas (the weapon crafting works great), but their implementation is not.

Also, the plot is boring, the pseudointellectual dialogue is intolerable and the narrator... don't. Just don't.

You can read my full review in spanish here.

For now, I'll leave you with a few captures. The (very limited) Photo mode is one of the few elements of Biomutant that I really enjoyed. As I said, the game is actually pretty and colorful.

I got the platinum trophy. I played everything required for that and then some. I rented the game. Played on PS5.

My take: it's not worth $60, not even close, and I'd feel pretty burned if I paid $60 for this game. If you're like me and want at the very least a mediocre story from a game, this game is not for you. The story is terrible, the dialogue is straight up obnoxious, the major characters have less personality than Skyrim bandits. The main problem with pretty much all of this is the straight up awful approach they took with the narrator. There's great narrators, like Disco Elysium, Bastion, Transistor, then there's this game, where he's translating for characters in the most awkward and irritating way possible, so even if you turn him off, the subtitles still ensure all NPCs have no personality and you still have to read the annoying phrasing. This is one of two games where I got so sick of the story I straight up started skipping it, the other game being Kingdoms of Amalur (which oddly enough this game reminds me a lot of, good and bad). The cardinal sin of Amalur is that it was insanely boring. The cardinal sin with this game is that it's annoying and boring.

If you played any new Assassin's Creed and thought "god this game feels f***ing bloated and there's too many boring side quests" stay away from this game. It's got all the worst open world quest design in the world. Fetch quests upon fetch quest with no good justification or reason for doing them. This part ties back to the awful story in many ways.

Anyway, if those two things are issues for you, this game is not only not worth the money it's not worth the time to play it. Now, onto the good parts.

Gameplay wise it's alright. The sound effects are awful but the devs say they are fixing that, so that issue could just be dated pretty soon. Honestly I like the combat well enough, it's not genius or buttery smooth, but if you enjoy combat from other games like new Assassin's Creed, Amalur, Witcher 3, you'll like it well enough. If you go in expecting God of War or Demon's Souls quality you'll be disappointed though. By around the 20 hour mark I wasn't really interested in fighting that much anymore, so it does get kinda old after awhile.

Where the game really shines is in it's "zen" exploration, which is helped and driven by the neat art design. it's got a water color + comic book style to it, and it's kinda just a joy to do your own thing and enjoy the trees and fields while looking around in ruined building for another green item you'll scrap.

It's also super polished and I had no issues with bugs or glitches. That was kinda nice lol.

I think it's brilliant such a small team essentially made an Ubisoft game. I think that's dope and I really hope other smaller devs jump on that. While the narrator, characters, dialogue, quest design, and story straight up ruined it for me, it might not for you if this isn't an issue.

3/5 but far closer to a 2/5 than a 4/5

A rather positive take on this game:

It’s rare that I’ll forgive lackluster story or mediocre combat, but the unbelievably positive energy in its other aspects creates such a winning atmosphere that I find it hard to hold its failures against it. Yes, Biomutant‘s story could be a lot better, but it’s also an adventure where an otter in a wetsuit builds the player a jetski so they can cruise to an archipelago and battle mutants around the rusty remains of ancient shipwrecks. I wish the fighting was more thoughtfully designed, but then again, a lemur taught me how to use a submarine so I could fight a giant turtle in an underwater city.

https://gamecritics.com/daniel-weissenberger/biomutant-review/