By: Jermain “CausticxArma” Crawford
Let me first be frank with you, Biomutant is not a game that I will likely finish anytime soon. The reasons for that are many but when it boils down to it being fun as the principal concepts that create the core game environment are completely serviceable none of it really clicks in a meaningful way. The player while entertained is also likely not entirely sure what, where, why or who is important unless you’ve been trying REALLY hard to.
Before I get ahead of myself and make you drop the game before giving it at least a shot let me go ahead and do a little reviewers diligence and give a quick rundown of the game and its world.
Biomutant is a 3rd person open world action Rpg, and it’s a genre with as many titles as there are words in that sentence, time 100. As such it comes with thall the expected mechanics and content to explore that we’ve come to expect. Taking place in a post-human society where anthropomorphic animals are the sole inheritors of the planet,our map is divided up into villages in a sort of feudal era format. As such the brunt of the game when not saving the world will be about how you choose to be your friends. Each of which come with their own benefits largely this is all about preference and to encourage replayability.
After a rather long tutorial you are set out about the world to make your first choice in ally and some light fable-esque alignment decisions that seem to be dictating what sort of ending the player receive and what powers you may invest in early on (you can get all of them so don’t panic).
You’ll get introduced to a quite confusingly fun yet unsatisfying combat system as well as a robust look and crafting system neither of which is actually explained well enough in my opinion and increasingly confusing to anyone who wasn’t paying attention early on in the game.
While none of these things separately is a damnable offense when combined with the bland writing that makes up the core story quests you are left with little reason to slog on through the gameplay cycle presented unless you are an achievement hunter/ completionist. None of the characters are memorable or interesting, and this is exacerbated by the fact that your entire game is filled with the gibberish language of the mutant population punctuated by the constant presence of a narrator to do your interpreting story book style. Neither of these things is amusing after the first hour and adds to the mental drain it feels the game begins to take as you go into an area and either befriend or defeat a rival village, get some new gadget then fight one of the 4 BIG BOSSES of which I’ve gotten 3 done. They all require some special vehicle and item to initiate and play out in a similar fashion to one another which adds to my dread when I consider the exploration aspects I enjoyed comparatively.
Overall I want to like this game but it leaves so much to be desired in the fact it might do too many things at once and not a single one of them amazingly outside the art.
6.5/10 Buy on a sale for the love of God.