.story
Biomutant tells the story of a silent mouse-looking mutant, an avatar fully created with a basic in-game editor. The world is populated by many kinds of mutants split between who wants to save and carefully use the planet's resources and who wants to take everything for themselves and see the nature rot. It is clear since the first hours of gameplay that Biomutant doesn't focus too much on the plot. The game is fully voiced by narrator that talks a bit too much sometimes and takes his time despite the world's ending. Our main role in all this is re-enstablish the order by putting down the Wolrd-eaters, giant beasts that will oversee the world once defeated. They will also take the same pose of the four Divine Beasts of Breath of the Wild. We also have to reunite the tribes by fighting three factions of two sides, dark of light, depending on the side we take. Nothing is really well thorough and to be fair I don't complain. It isn't that much interesting. Biomutant is developed by Experiment 101 and some of them were behind the Just Cause franchise which isn't exactly that kind of game you buy for the storyline. When the NPCs are not focused on telling us 100 times our goal or breaking the 4th wall by saying that we need to protect and respect the planet Earth they can be quite funny but they didn't put much effort on developing any of them. Right after the beginning we are asked to choose a side between dark and light that reflects our actions, evil or good. This impacts the Psy powers we can get, despite being able to get the powers of both sides later in the game, and the ending. Don't expect anything mindblowing anyway.
.gameplay
Biomutant plays a lot like Ratchet and Clank. There are different playstyles, given early by choosing different classes: melee, dual, ranged, psyonic. This affects the beginning of the game because later on we will be able to mix them all even though they will still keep some of their identity with some unique perks and skill that will make them more proficient in that playstyle. The most fun part is defeating the world-eaters. Fights are unique and have multiple phases. Point is all of them have the same mission's scheme which require us to find the specific weapon and ammo before the assault. They are not well fused into the story and all we know is we have to defeat them to save the world! In order to defeat some of them we can unlock a mech, an underwater mech and a water bike. Only the latter has a purpose outside this fight. The others are useless and forgotten by the game after we land the relative kill. It was just a waste of time to develop them and all we have are just a couple of cosmetics for them and that's pretty much it. Another main story path wants us to liberate or conquer the different tribes and reunite the world. After taking side of one of two factions, 3 good and 3 evil, we just complete different tasks for them and think it might have any impact in the game. It doesn't. Pad at hand Biomutant is quite fun. Psy and ranged style are more favoured and easy to master. Also playing melee makes the game a very boring hack n slash by smashing buttons and try to parry enemies, which takes a lot of time to master and a 3-button combination to land the complete counter-attack sometimes. Ranged is the way to go but on the long run it becomes just an infinite rolling while shooting type of game. Biomutant has loot boxes hidden in numerous outposts on a medium size world map. I would say it's still big enough to get bored of walking back and fourth despite a good amount of teleports and the map's feature to track all the completed outpost. Crafting is a thing and doesn't require lots of planning to get good weapons with the level of challenge the game offers. Other than fighting there are some mini-puzzles in-between, nothing special but cool enough to deserve a mention.
.sound
Hardly anything much to say. Biomutant is pretty much a flat line in this front. I appreciated the idea of a single narrator for the whole game, well done and gave a unique touch.
.graphics
Biomutant runs pretty well on PC. After some patches most of the bugs are gone but I still had to load a previous savestate when my mech disappeared completely from the game. The worldmap has a good size. The game world is colorful, detailed and all the creatured are well-animated but still looking generic and lifeless. I like this kind of post-apocalyptic saturated colour adventure game but it doesn't have the same soul Enslaved and Horizon showed in the recent past.
.verdict
Biomutant is the first game from Experiment 101, a small studio with many ideas. Unfortunately most of them just drafted and left to die in a shell that wanted to do too much.
