Biomutant Review

Booting up Biomutant, you’re met with a cutscene you’ll likely have seen in the game’s trailer. You see your plucky little rodent-thing facing off against a gigantic beast in a face-off that ends with your character jumping into a hole in the wall. Except, that’s not actually your character; you’ll get the chance to make your own furry little dude to play as later on.

This is the first point at which you’ll notice the jank of Biomutant. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way either; there’s just a charming level of not-quite-there-ness throughout that shows off how big the scope for the game was. At the same time, there are also reminders that Biomutant isn’t some giant AAA title, but one made by a far smaller team. There are little oddities when interacting with the world that hint at a standard model used for everything, but that yours likely isn’t it. Having made your (probably) derpy looking protagonist and picked their stats and class, you’ll play through that opening scene again, but this time as the tutorial.

You’ll punch, kick, slash, shoot, magic, and slash your way through this all, and you’ll come out with a head slightly swimming with mechanics, different kinds of skill points to keep in mind, and then emerge into the massive and incredibly beautiful world of Biomutant.

That is a nice rock

The world itself is the highlight of Biomutant. There are wide-open plains, dense radioactive forests, dusty mountains, arid deserts, areas covered in oil, and basically anything else you can think of. All of it is striking to look at, and you’ll find yourself getting distracted by side quests and places to explore almost constantly.

Unfortunately, the side quests don’t tend to be anything more than gathering items or killing specific creatures, but it’ll scratch an itch if you enjoy completing checklists.

Of course, fighting is a huge part of Biomutant, as you’ll be expecting, so you’re going to be doing a lot of it. While the combat can easily look like something out of a character action game, the reality is that it’s not as well-tuned. Instead, regardless of which class you end up choosing, you’re likely to end up shooting at everything instead of hitting it, or even using your magical abilities. It’s fine, but outside of the odd cool move here and there, the combat feels flat and uninspiring.

No, no, he has a point

As you explore the world and progress the story, you’ll end up helping or hindering the people you come across, as well as deciding to save or doom the world based on your decisions, which will determine your alignment. Watching your good and bad conscience arguing in front of you while trying to convince you to follow them is entertaining, and there’s room for replayability with different moral decisions to make, but having played through the game once, I’m not compelled to jump into the new game plus to explore how much of a difference these things make.

The other highlight of Biomutant is the characters you meet, all of whom talk in their own version of gibberish and is relayed to you via a narrator. I actually quite like the narrator; they were fairly hopeful throughout my version of the story, and spent a lot of time commenting on the change between day and night or the goings-on around me, as though pushing on a young child to learn about the world and try and do good. However. there’s also an option to turn down his comments on your journey outside of the key moments, and I do think a lot of people are going to use that.

This is actually quite indicative of the bulk of Biomutant. While there is a lot of crafting, upgrading, and altering to do, you don’t really need to engage with these if you don’t want to. I think the Biomutant experience is going to split people into two main camps. The first will be made up of people like me, who enjoy what it does and respect what it’s attempting to do, but aren’t enamoured with it. The second camp, on the other hand, will be people who’ve turned the difficulty down to easy and just want to exist in a new world, and I think those people are going to be delighted with the game thanks to its beautiful setting and multitude of systems.

I’m not in this camp, however. While I definitely enjoyed my time with Biomutant, I’m left feeling a little deflated coming out the other end of it. The world of Biomutant was a joy to traverse, and there was an almost Breath of the Wild quality, the same drive to see what was over the hill in front of me, or what was around the corner. However, given that combat plays such a huge part of the game, the rather middling nature of it makes fights feel like inconveniences, rather than something to enjoy.