Introduction
Biomutant is an open world action RPG that was developed by Swedish Studio Experiment 101 and published by THQ Nordic. It was released in May 2021 for PC and Consoles. It saw Xbox Series X and Ps5 released in September 2022.
Video Review
Review
When the world tree is dying, you come back to the lands that you ran from to decide its fate. Will you help save it? Or will you help destroy it? The choice is yours. With a war waging between tribes and World Eaters in need of destruction, you have lots to do while trying to deal with ghosts of your past. Can you bear it all? Or will you run again?
Unfortunately as amazing as all that sounds, there is nothing here. At least for the story anyway. The world eaters feel underbaked and they all require the same kind of quest to get too. Gather stuff to fix this thing you can ride so you can get to it. Even the dialogue leading up to them all doesn’t do anything to build them up. Nothing is special here! So when I finally fought and defeated them I felt literally no sense of accomplishment for the world that I was helping save.
When it comes to the other side of the “story”, and I use that term very lightly, at the beginning of the game, you pick your affiliation. Do you want to help the light side, or the dark side? This changes the ending, so the game says. I went with the light side, so my goal was to save the world tree and unite the clans. This is all boring as well and the dialogue is ALL LITERALLY the same in every instance! So you take out some bases, then go to the big enemy fortress, and decide if you want to fight or convince them to be peaceful. Heck 40% of the way through this storyline, you can literally choose to end it! Hooray, everyone is living in harmony! Why give that choice? It just made it feel like the developers don’t even care about the storylines they tried crafting.
I can’t say I didn’t have fun, because the rest of the game let me have fun. For the first 32 hours that I played this, I did nothing but explore the world, see the sights, and make myself incredibly OP, sort of. When you get into the game, the best part is that you get to craft your weapons. It’s nothing deep by any means. You get to choose a few varieties of melee weapons and ranged weapons, then you choose their base part, like the blade or barrel, then build around it. This was really fun to do, especially when I found newer pieces around the world to try and re-modify the weapons to see if I could make them better. The downside? You can’t craft armor. You can put upgrade pieces in them, but that wasn’t as exciting.
As you level up, you get upgrade points so you can buy new combos for your weapons. I honestly only bought the few I wanted for the weapon types I loved using, then no more. You eventually start being able to use super powers depending on how your morality aligns, but all these felt super weak in comparison to my weapons. Completing side quests really helped level me fast, and there were a ton to complete. From collectible sets, like playing with TV knobs, or fixing music sheets, to doing random things like finding people. But none of the quests had deep storylines. They felt like they were just slapped in because this is an open world game. Someone wants you to find someone who’s lost? Well they’re at the other end of the world and you’re in the FIRST town! It made absolutely no sense! Why would I go there first?
When you level, the enemies level with you. The one thing I hate in any open world game is auto scaling. It makes the leveling system feel pointless and makes me not feel like I’m getting any stronger. Isn’t that the point of games like this? To become so strong you crush your enemies? Even if I am a weird deformed cat, I still wanna feel powerful! Though it did feel nice when I got to 100% elemental resistance so I could walk in the snowy mountains whenever I wanted without freezing to death. Too bad I couldn’t fast travel out to where I wanted because the fast travel system sucks! You find totems your cat character pees on to mark fast travel locations. Unfortunately some areas have way too many, and others have way too little. Why?
The game had a lot of screen tearing issues even on the Ps5 version that I was playing, but I never really noticed anything else on the technical side luckily. It’s a pretty polished game when it comes to all that, it’s just missing many other things, sadly.
Rating
Pros:
- Fun World
- Enjoyable Puzzles
Cons:
- Story Is Non Existent
- Side Quests Are Just Filler
- Screen Tearing Happens A Lot
Summary
I was so excited to finally jump into this game. Did I enjoy the gameplay and world? Yes. But the rest of the game? No. Absolutely not. Can I recommend this? I’m not sure. If you do give this a chance, just be wary of all the shortcomings, because there are a lot.
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Game & Developer Information
Developer Website: Experiment 101
Developer Socials: Twitter
Publisher Website: THQ Nordic
Publisher Socials: Twitter
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