REVIEW | Biomutant: A genetic gaming abmonitation

Genetic modified creatures, special weapons and upgrades, and a vast a savage world to explore. These seem like the perfect combination for a game of success, right? Biomutant is the first major production by studio Experiment 101, published by THQ Nordic.

Nevertheless, this combination of differents gaming elements ends up creating a mutant abomination that is so bizarre as the creatures presents in the game, leaving the player with a experience very hollow and generic.

Disclaimer: This review was produced by a copy of the game for PS5, provided by Terminals.

Cybernetic confusion

As any good RPG game begins, Biomutant starts by letting the player choose all the attributes and details of its character. In its first screens, you may be overwhelmed by the quantity of information that you must select to start playing. Even so, many of the your player’s settings will make no difference in the gameplay experience, so if you just prefer to set everything on auto, feel free to do it.

From there, you are thrown into a bizarre and crumbling world that was taken by nature and is infested by dangers and other creatures as stranger as you that will try to kill at every opportunity. The combat is very simple: you can dodge incomming attacks and use your first and second weapons to create special combinations to defeat your foe.

In terms of story plot, Biomutant starts with a good post-apocalyptic promise but falls very quickly into the common cliche for this type of approach. All the experience tends to become even more painful to watch when you have to listen to the terrible narrator explaining each action that the player must do or is doing in the moment.

Not even Navi, the fairy companion from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, can be as annoying as the narrator from Biomutant. For the first couple of hours he will not let go of your hand (and ears) by telling you exactly what you must do to progress the game.

But even when the game finally let you walk freely, there is not so much things to explore in the world of Biomutant. Visually the environments are impressive and the game runs smoothly with 1080p resolution and 60 FPS on PS5. The details of the forest, enemy designs and other structures in the game are quite impressive. Nevertheless, graphical beauty does not define a good game.

A lot of ideas mixed up in the wrong way

Your character can engage in several types of combats and even invade enemy camps. When you become really invested on the combat and exploration and forget about the clumsy story, the game feels almost like a Far Cry title, except with a third person view.

The items and other rewards that you collect — in the most RPG sense of the genre — will serve to upgrade your gear, get better weapons and even get a special vehicle to cross the world more easily. Unfortunately, the exploration becomes dull very quickly and the combat becomes more a smash button competion, throwing all the RPG elements away.

At any moment a careful player will notice that there are many efforts from the developers to tailor and polish the many ideas that were inserted into the plot and mechanics of Biomutant. The real issue is how these concepts get mixed up on the game and produce an experience that is as much boring as it is forgetable.

I could almost recommend Biomutant to a player that does not like RPG so much and is looking for a game with nice visuals, combat and exploration — but everything at a very simplistic and shallow level. But considering that there are so many other titles out there that work so much better with these (and other ideas), Biomutant must not be a game recommendation in any possible scenario.

So much potential…

In the end, Biomutant feels like a stuffed game with a bunch of different ideas that, most of the time, do not talk very well with each other. It seems that Experiment 101 focused much more time and effort to use various concepts in Biomutant than strenghning its qualities to deliver a good experience for the player.

Final Opinion: Not so good

By Luis Antonio Costa