It feels like we’ve been hearing about Biomutant for a while considering its initial reveal back in 2017. But the game is here now and it’s an interesting mix of eras that will appeal to some and bore others.
Biomutant
Developer: Experiment 101
Price: $60
Platform: PC, PS4, and Xbox One
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
In Biomutant there are three overarching storylines to work through: getting revenge on the person who killed your family, uniting/conquering all the tribes in the region, and choosing the fate of the Tree of Life that’s currently being poisoned and eaten by these massive creatures known as world eaters. The setting is interesting for sure, what with a sort of post-apocalyptic styled world with differing tribes studying a different type of kung-fu (called Wung-Fu), but the game suffers from poor writing that fails to get you engaged in it. A lot of the dialog just feels superfluous, and characters will sometimes repeat, verbatim, the same lines in the same conversation. It all just leads to you have a trigger happy finger on the “skip dialog” button.
The main offender here is that, being animals, all the characters speak in gibberish (think Animal Crossing) and a wildlife documentary styled narrator translates for you. The issue here is that you have to sit and listen to the character speak their gibberish, then wait for the narrator to tell you what they said, effectively doubling all conversations. On top of this, since the narrator is translating through his own point of view, you don’t ever really get a sense of a character’s personality. You’re TOLD aspects of a character by the narrator, but you never really feel like it’s them conveying it. A main part of the story is choosing a handful of characters to save at the end of the game, as you have an Ark to fill with limited spots, but considering I didn’t really care about anyone I didn’t really care who got in the Ark or not. What could have worked better would be if they just nixed the narrator and had the subtitles do the translating instead, as this would’ve solved the conversational length, and lack of character personality in one fell swoop.
Wrapped around this is a karma system that determines how characters react to you, but I’ll be honest in that it’s not a system you have to be majorly concerned over. I choose to go evil pretty early on since I wanted the armor for an evil faction, but I never really got a sense that my evil choices were particularly meaningful. A lot of characters would simply just chastise me for my choice, and effectively guilt trip me saying I’m going down a bad path and that there’s still time to “go to the light”. Karma can be affected by dialog choices, which sometimes aren’t super obvious, but mainly by killing/saving critters or prisoners out in the open world. Some abilities are locked behind how much karma you have, but besides that it seemed like a system that was put in for the sake of it. The game isn’t even super picky about you committing to a side; I wanted a particular evil power and got enough points to unlock that and then immediately started focusing on getting good points so I could get those powers so it all came off as redundant.
Combat and crafting is where Biomutant shines however. It’s nothing as in-depth as a Devil May Cry per say, but fights in this game are quick and loose in a way that feels good that doesn’t require much thought. The game has a surprising variety of weapons to acquire, with unique ones gained from conquering one of the various tribes in the game, and the rest crafted through the resources you acquire in loot boxes. They all (thankfully) share the exact same combo strings which makes swapping between them during fights a complete breeze as you’ll go from whacking dudes around with a massive hammer, to a rocket fist while mixing in firearms and your powers. The game definitely has a sort of weightlessness to it, as your little critter will practically dart across the arena dishing out combos, but it makes up for it in pure pizazz and dramatic effects explode all around. The game really starts to shine when you go up against the larger enemies as your character scrambles across the battlefield during these almost kaiju like boss battles, that you’re usually aided by with a vehicle like a mech or submarine.
Besides the tribe specific weapons, you’ll be able to craft any other weapon you want in the game that are split into various categories between melee and ranged. You’ll find parts scattered all over the world and you’ll put them together to make anything from an ice infused shotgun, to a hammer that deals radioactive damage. Depending on the weapon type, you’ll have a certain amount of parts to put together to craft them, but it’s the silliness of the pieces that really makes this feature stand out. I wanted to make use of a new elemental sword piece I had found, so I used a plunger as the handle and slapped some screws on the blade for bonus damage. The guns in particular can look extra ridiculous with just the sheer amount of visual variety you’ll experience with all the parts you can use. It really adds a touch of personal ownership over the weapons you craft, as the hammer I made might look drastically different from yours.
Your little guy isn’t just an expert with traditional weaponry as they can also sling around various mutant powers like acid or lighting balls. The powers start to get a lot more visually interesting the higher level you get as you’ll unlock mushrooms that can bounce enemies (or yourself) in the air, or my personal favorite which is a bubble that incases you and allows you to bounce around while sticking enemies to it and exploding them outward when the bubble bursts. There’s a lot of fun to be had with the powers, I just wish that most of them didn’t cost so many points to buy as it felt like you only got a slow drip of unlock points as you play. Some of the costlier abilities cost 20+ points and you only ever get two per level which means you’re going to have to be sitting on a trove of points for a good while.
Biomutant’s world makes a lot of sense when you realize the studio is made up of former Avalanche Studios developers, known primarily for the Just Cause series. You have this massive world with gorgeous lush jungles or arid deserts with stuff to do, and nooks and crannies to poke your head into, but a lot of it just feels like busywork. It feels very much in the vein of an Ubisoft open-world with a litany of things to do but not much substance to them; perhaps the biggest comparison I could draw is to Breathe of the Wild. There’s a very definite “what’s that?” as you spot something in the distance and want to go explore closer, and for the most part there’s a reward waiting for you in the form of loot; it’s just that this is repeated ad nauseum. Movement feels slow as well, as the vehicles or animal mounts you can acquire move *just* slow enough to make it annoying, which is compounded when you have to trek back and forth between locations for quests. My issue is that I’m just not a fan of this style of open-world, I’m very much aware that this is a “me” problem and know friends who would totally dive into this game to explore every inch of it, but this style of open-world isn’t something I’m huge on.
The Final Word
There’s some fun to be had with Biomutant, but it’s the type of fun that’ll attract a specific group of gamers that’ll throw on a podcast as they mindlessly explore the game’s world.
– MonsterVine Rating: 3.5 out of 5 – Fair
