Biomutant, a colourful open-world RPG was originally announced around 4 years ago. There was quite a lot of hype leading up to the release, but it seems many were disappointed.
Humans have been wiped out due to the Toxanol Corporation not being careful of their nuclear waste disposal. Presumably this has caused rodents to mutate and now populate the world. There are a few clans that populate the strongholds across the lands. There's four “World Eaters” that are large mutants that are gnawing on the Tree Of Life. Your aim is to restore the Tree Of Life.
There’s quite a few options for the character creator. You choose a breed which determines your face and some base attributes. Your initial attributes determine your physique, so high agility makes you slim, high vitality makes you fat, Intellect gives you a large head etc. There’s Vitality, Strength, Intellect, Charisma, Agility, Luck. The class determines your weapon specialty. Then you can set some basic resistances. I went for the Saboteur character who could dual wield. I heard the game was easy, so I decided I would go extreme with my character, so I went 100% agile but then had low health, strength etc. The first few levels I was boosting my luck and agility. Note: Even though 100 was the max level in the creation screen, once you start the game, the max seems more like 600, so I wasn’t actually that agile after all.
The game has a narrator. I did wonder if the narrator is your robotic cricket companion but maybe the narrator is just translating for him. The narration style is quite reminiscent of The Stanley Parable, but it’s also quite childish. The naming for everything seems quite like Harry Potter; Sinkidink, Gizmo, Googlide, Porky Puff, Jumbo Puff etc.
He also translates for all characters in the game. So you hear a few seconds of indecipherable language then the narrator speaks after. I quite liked the narration as you move through the environment (although it did grow tiresome towards the end), but the translations slowed the dialogue system down and made every character seem like they had the same personality. There’s also too much dialogue so I quickly became disinterested. A lot of the NPC’s don’t say anything interesting either.
During the first couple of hours of the game, the amount of interruptions is infuriating. Sometimes you will finish a cutscene, walk five steps then be interrupted again for more dialogue. I think this is most people’s source of frustration with the game. (Note: the first patch looks like it addresses these issues, but some of their other changes look like it could make the overall game easier)
There’s a basic morality system. Even the morality system is slow; since it features a devil and angel character that argue with each other every time you make a choice.
A main part of the game is acquiring loot. Equipment that you don’t want can be scrapped into some basic materials like wood, plastic, rubber etc. These are also acquired by destroying towers of these resources. You can craft items from scratch as long as you have the parts, or add/replace parts to your current equipment.
Even though I wanted to dual wield pistols, it took me around 9 hours until I found the second pistol. When I went to craft, I could only craft rifles. The game was much more comfortable once I could dual wield, because then I had essentially double the ammo capacity and fire-rate.
The combat is a mix of melee and ranged. You can block/parry enemies attacks with the correct timing, then this allows you to counter. Some enemies I found it hard to counter, or they could have many short-range moves where it was encouraged to keep your distance. This meant that ranged combat was the main combat style.
When you trigger special attacks, or try to fire when you need to reload, you see some comic onomatopoeia so “klick!”, “pow!” etc will appear in cartoon font. It was a bit weird because this wasn’t used in other areas of the game.
Some enemies have elemental attacks. You can also gain some with your Psi-Powers. Some areas are contaminated with radiation or extreme temperatures so you need to have a high resistance to explore those areas. Morks drop Bio Points. You can also find Bio Points in hazardous containers. These give you points for either biogenetic abilities or increase your resistance. You can also increase your character’s resistance via equipment.
Enemies often stand around even though they could easily overwhelm you if they attacked at once. Sometimes you see groups of enemies already fighting each other, and you join in to help them. There weren't that many enemy types in the game. Often they just seem like simple pallet swaps, so their move-set is often very predictable.
There are some special weapons or items to collect which are used to explore certain areas. There’s a crowbar for prying doors, and the Klonkfist, a rocket powered gauntlet which can destroy walls.
You can tame mounts to ride on the overworld, although the ones I had didn’t seem much faster than my character, so I mainly didn’t bother. As part of the story, you need to acquire mechs/vehicles to navigate some areas and then battle against the World Eaters. (Mech, Speedboat, Horseback, Submarine.)
When you level up, you can boost one of your attributes by 10 points, and also spend upgrade points on Wung-Fu special attacks or perks.
Some treasure chests and doors can only be opened by solving puzzles. These puzzles are very simplistic and mostly involve turning dials to match yellow or white colours. There were a few puzzles that were already in their solved state, so I just had to move a dial, then move it back to trigger. I think the game said you have limited moves based on your character's Intellect but I didn’t notice an extra allowance when I put extra points into Intellect.
You urinate on sign-posts to activate them as fast travel points. Usually these are outside towns or key points of interest, but it didn’t always seem to be the case.
The world in general looks nice, and there’s enough variety to the scenery. I think there were too many copy and paste locales, especially when dealing with rival tribes, bandit forts, and towns. Some of these places were completely identical, so you could move the same route through them to open all the chests.
Some of the dark areas are far too dark, which includes the final boss. It wasn’t very enjoyable fighting a dark coloured boss in the darkness.
The loading times are very long. Once you start playing, it doesn’t need to load unless you die or fast travel. I also often suffered low framerate. Some sections were fairly constant at 60, but then there were many sections that were 30, sometimes dropping to 15 for no apparent reason (one on one fights, rather than having loads of enemies to process).
I think open world games become boring quickly. I know many people love the genre but it often becomes a sequence or repetitive mundane tasks, and this is just the same. If you love these games, then add a couple of points onto my score. The combat seemed very bullet spongy but that could be because I went for a weak character after being told it was easy. It would be better if there were more enemy designs because the combat got too predictable and repetitive early in the game. I think the presentation and simplified puzzles probably mean this is aimed at a younger audience.