Biomutant Action Role-Playing Game, Xbox One & PS5

Biomutant: This ambitious action RPG from ex-Just Cause and Mad Max devs caught many people’s attention, including my own. It’s a bright, colorful game set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with interesting anthropomorphic creatures that aren’t human but aren’t exactly specific animals either.

Biomutant

This was shaping up to be a massive new IP, but in an industry filled with great post-apocalyptic games like Fallout and Horizon, does Biomutant do enough to stand out amongst the titans? First, you choose your mutant, with each type having different attributes you can upgrade later, such as vitality, strength, and charisma. I chose the default option as I felt it was the best balanced in the selection.

Then you customize your fur’s color patterns right before taking off on your quest. In this world, humans are no more and mutants have taken over, with the Tree of Life serving as the beacon of hope. As the protagonist, your backstory is tragic, growing up in a small village that was invaded by a carnivore named Lupa-Lupin who killed your parents. Now that you’re grown up, you embark on a quest to destroy the World Eaters who threaten all life, and get revenge on Lupa-Lupin, or forgive him for what he’s done.

It’s all up to you, as your decisions affect the outcome of the journey. Your light or dark aura will increase depending on the choices you make, whether you choose to negotiate conflicts with peace instead of violence, or even something as little as petting an animal or killing it. The amount of light and dark within you will affect the ending, and also determine which main quests you’ll do next.

If starting with an initially light aura, it’ll be recommended that you ally with a heroic tribe instead of a villainous one, which will then lead you to capture the rival tribe’s fortresses. And if you decide to make peace with their captains, the remaining fortresses will surrender and you can accept their truce to end the mission early. This is a neat feature to reward different playstyles.

That said, the light and dark system in Biomutant isn’t as complex as it is in other RPGs, only having major effects on the ending and some story missions. And unfortunately, the story leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t help that the narrator is your only tool to interpret the story, as he speaks for every character, quite literally telling you what they’re saying. It’s as if you’re being read a storybook.

Biomutant game characters

And as good as the narrator’s acting is, some essential elements get lost in this method of storytelling. As a result of not actually the characters themselves, their personalities feel flat. Their faces don’t show any emotion either, so none of them really stand out. And because we only hear the narrator’s interpretation of what they’re saying, it makes them all sound like the same person, in voice and personality.

It’s more poetic than matter-of-fact, with most characters hammering the point that only you can create your own destiny, you must forgive your enemies, and you have to let go of the past to move forward. This might’ve been fine for one or two characters, but I got annoyed after the fifth one was telling me the same thing. Why would I want to save this world when I have no attachments to the people in it?

The plot could’ve been engaging with more interesting characters and dialogue, and it’s unfortunate to see that the overall story presentation is quite dull. What isn’t dull, however, is the open world itself. It is strikingly beautiful, with rich, colorful environments accompanied by a soothing, ambient soundtrack Running through the sun-soaked world is a feast for the eyes, even if some of the rocks and foliage take a while to load into the background.

I played Biomutant on PS5, which is basically the PS4 Pro version running at 1080p 60fps upscaled to 4K. I wasn’t able to play on an actual PS4 Pro, so I can only speak for the PS5 experience, and the game in its performance mode runs at a steady 60 frames per second throughout, with some occasional dips here and there, mostly during combat. While it’s a bummer it’s not running at a native 4K resolution, it still looks and performs really well, but I’m surprised the loading screens take as long as they do, around 5 to 10 seconds, despite being installed on the SSD.

I’m probably just spoiled by the uber-fast loading times of games like Returnal and Mass Effect Legendary Edition. However, I’ve had technical issues with this port, as it crashed 4 or 5 times throughout my playthrough. It did get updated during the review period though, and it hasn’t crashed on me since then, so it’s possible the issue’s been addressed. Being an open-world game, Biomutant does fall into some of the tropes we’ve come to expect from the genre, such as locations to loot, enemy fortresses to raid, and waypoint markers.

Don’t worry, you don’t climb towers, you just pee on signs to mark your territory. It’s that kind of game. Not to say these features are bad, in fact, I kind of enjoyed them. Whenever I’d stumble upon an abandoned building, the game would provide a list of items to find and puzzles to solve within the area. So if I had time, I would go in there to try and check everything off, discovering new loot and items.

There are also side quests to do, and you’ll accidentally run into these often. While you can beat the main quests in about 10 hours, completing most of the sidequests will bring that up to 50 hours, according to the developers. While I haven’t exactly reached that amount of playtime, it’s believable, because there’s a lot of sidequests in the game. Unfortunately, a lot of them are the same. Matter of fact, a lot of the sidequests are actual checklists, like finding all the guitars in the world, saving a certain amount of hostages, and completing a number of puzzles.

I know I just said I like to checkboxes in open-world games, but not when they take up the sidequests portion. I like it when sidequests have actual stories to them, and there aren’t that many of those in Biomutant. The ones that are there however can reward you with some valuable gear, like an upgrade to your giant iron fist. Regardless, I enjoyed looting buildings in the game more than completing sidequests.

It’s not for everyone, but I have a little bit of an obsession with clearing off every objective in an open-world game, and Biomutant scratched a bit of that itch for me. I say a bit because the loot gathered in this game isn’t that rewarding due to the archaic nature of just USING the loot. You’ll gather all sorts of weapons, attachments, clothes, and consumables on your journey, and in order to modify your armor and weapons, you have to make use of the crafting menu.

Here you can add and remove parts to your melee and ranged weapons, giving them better attributes or simply making them more powerful. The problem is that it’s not as simple as just attaching the parts. You need to have a certain amount of resources to attach them. So if you’re low on bottled water, you can find an old piece of gear to scrap it for resources, or you’ll just have to return to the game and find some resource totems scattered around the world.

It’s a cumbersome process that makes what should be an enjoyable feature frustrating. Granted, this could’ve worked better with more streamlined menus. If you’re looking at your items in the gear menu and decide you want to modify a weapon, you have to unselect the weapon, leave the gear menu, go to the crafting menu, and select the weapon again. A shortcut to get to the crafting menu instantly would have been nice.

What’s more, is that if you get a new piece of armor, there is no way to immediately compare it to what you’re currently wearing. That and you have to unequip the modifications on your current armor and re-equip them when you’re wearing the new one, instead of just simply transferring the modifications over in a snap. Honestly, the menus in the Biomutant take the fun out of a lot of features.

When you level up, you are given the choice to upgrade an attribute, such as your vitality, intellect, etc. That’s easy there, but you’re also given currency to unlock Wung-Fu combo moves, which is this game’s martial art. They have different combos for each weapon type, and quite a few of them are already unlocked at the beginning. And even when I think I’m doing the right combo for a weapon I have equipped, it doesn’t work.

So the only thing that really mattered to me when leveling up where the attribute increases. Biomutant throws so many features at the player that it’s hard to focus on one thing, and I haven’t even mentioned the psi-powers yet. These are unlockable supernatural abilities that emit fire, poison, ice, or other elements, but I never really found a practical use for them I sometimes forgot they’re even an option.

I found the ice to be best as it freezes enemies in place, but I wonder why some of these other abilities even exist. Like the power to float above enemies and the power to spawn a random bouncy mushroom. These psi-powers interrupted the flow of combat so I mostly stuck with melee and ranged weapons. The combat in Biomutant isn’t perfect, but I enjoy it, as it lets me swap between using swords for close encounters and guns for some medium-range distance fights.

Using a combination of the two is recommended, as the melee combos can deal massive damage when you pull them off. Having guns on hand will be beneficial if you’re low on health and need to get some distance from an aggressive foe. The best part is that swapping between melee and ranged is as easy as the press of a button. Melee attacks are mapped to Square or X and guns can be fired instantly with the right trigger. If only the menus were as streamlined as this.

Unfortunately the combat though doesn’t feel entirely responsive. Blocking with the left shoulder button sometimes doesn’t work and occasionally you will get button prompts that activate special dodges and attacks, but they don’t seem to work all that often, and I’m pressing them right when they show up. Even though I enjoy the combat system when it works, these problems can’t be ignored, and they’re even more present during the World Eater bosses.

These titans are your biggest threats, and they require special vehicles to kill, like a walking mech and an underwater vessel. I found the fights with these two machines to be the most enjoyable, as you’re just pummelling the beasts with missiles to your heart’s content. The other two bosses that use smaller vehicles are more of a challenge, as they move quickly and require you to hit their weak spots before you can deal damage.

What frustrated me about one of the fights was that I spent more time fighting the camera than the actual boss. There were other times in the game where the camera gave me problems, but this was the WORST of it. Biomutant initially showed a lot of promise, but it’s a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. While the presentation is gorgeous and the combat system is somewhat enjoyable, there are just way too many features, menus, and gameplay mechanics that overwhelm the player.

That, and the story is bland, left no lasting impression by the time the credits roll. The developers might’ve been better off cutting out some features that didn’t work, as the crafting, to spend time improving on ones that DID, like the combat. I have to say Biomutant left me MIXED. I see its potential, it just does way too much. If a sequel to this game is made, hopefully, the developers can trim the fat of the first one to make something much more memorable.