Biomutant
PC, PS4, Xbox One
The moments that make Biomutant worth playing exist not in spite of the game’s muddled identity but because of it
Developer Experiment 101 Publisher THQ Nordic
Format PC (tested), PS4, Xbox One Release Out now
The thought comes every so often as we explore Biomutant’s verdant wasteland. Knowing that its open world – a few square miles rich with jungle, marsh and scrubland – is the work of a remarkably small team, our mind occasionally wanders away from the fluttering vegetation underfoot, the pylons that jut out of the landscape, and turns instead to its creation. And the thought is always this: the decision-makers at Experiment 101 must surely be immune to the word ‘no’.
We are talking, after all, about a game in which a rodent martial artist and their robotic grasshopper companion battle furry kaiju in a post-human world. Like the last time the planet’s ruling species were wiped out, it’s the smaller mammals that step up, their evolution accelerated by the very same pollution that spelled mankind’s end. Now, thanks to four world-eating monsters, this post-apocalypse is facing a cataclysm of its own, which you can attempt to prevent or help bring about. There’s a certain manic energy to that premise, a mash of concepts that don’t obviously fit together, and the same is true of the game itself.
This becomes clear from the first combat tutorial. You’re able to switch seamlessly from the combos and parries of melee to a thirdperson shooter in the vein of Remedy’s back catalogue, complete with John Woo slow motion as you leap through the air with a pistol in each paw. The action is overlaid with comic-book sound effects that pop up on screen, celebrating critical hits with a “pow” or “ka-boom” and calling out special moves like a Shaw Brothers movie (“Tiger throw!” “Unknowable force!”“Seven sin snap!”). Mounted combat becomes an option too, letting you fire from the saddle of a horse-shaped automaton or hulking goat. Eventually, you’ll unlock a giant clockwork hand that can switch to finger-gun formation to blast enemies or simply knock them back with a flick of its pointer.
Dozens of hours in, the game is still introducing concepts – a new method of traversal, a power that changes the pace of combat, a throwaway idea you’ll use maybe twice. Meanwhile, we continue to find ourselves sporadically remembering some of the ones introduced in the opening flurry. Biogenetics and Psi-Powers are effectively two magic systems, upgraded with separate currencies but sharing the same set of buttons, meaning you can’t slot in more than four at a time. It’s only in the final stretch of battles that we stop forgetting that these abilities are even there. The special ammunition types, which imbue your gunfire with extra elemental damage, we’ve only just remembered in time to write this.
None of these ideas is new, of course. Biomutant is a relentless borrower, grabbing Gears Of War’s active reload, Breath Of The Wild’s glider and stamina-based swimming, and a basic version of Assassin’s Creed’s climbing system. The avatars of good and evil that squabble whenever you make a moral decision recall the advisors that sat on your god’s shoulder in Black & White.
A slightly antiquated point of reference, perhaps, but that’s precisely how Biomutant’s karma system feels. The story treats all this as if it’s the game’s thematic core, with a conclusion that bends to match your choices and an ever-present narrator who’ll occasionally chip in with musings on morality and fate. But the kind of ethical dilemmas you face are such stumpers as whether to free a captive from a bandit’s cage or murder them, or whether to pet small cuddly creatures you’ve caught in your net or murder them. As with the game’s factions, which are also aligned along the good-evil spectrum, it’s hard to shake the feeling that these systems are here simply because someone behind the scenes has a fondness for old RPGs, without necessarily considering how these concepts mesh with the game at hand. There’s also an in-depth crafting menu, multiple character upgrade paths and some awful rotational puzzles because, well, why not?
In truth, almost every aspect of Biomutant is one we’ve seen executed more sharply elsewhere, but occasionally they all collide in surprising ways. At one point, we wander into a fight already in progress between a furred behemoth and laser-spitting robot, both well beyond our current level, in a zone so starved of oxygen it’ll suffocate us if we stay too long. Keeping our distance while these titans chip away at each other’s health bars, we’re eventually able to swoop in and collect the reward, which turns out to be a hunk of the monster’s oversized excrement. So, yes: a surprise.
After unlocking the power of levitation – earned through good deeds (pet murderers get telekinesis instead), its optional nature almost tangible in the slightly wonky implementation – we’re able to skim across areas we’re sure should have been impassable. We look out onto moody twilit vistas while wearing a giant mascot head and wielding a giant irradiated carrot. One boss battle begins with us piloting a mech with the head of a duck, before taking us inside the leviathan to practice martial arts on the creature’s van-sized heart. We’re grateful for a game that is this willing to be silly, even if we can never be sure quite how intentional it all is.
There’s a ramshackle charm to Biomutant that helps us forgive the scrappy fights that go on too long, the fact that boss battles’ one-off mechanics never get fully explained, or the busywork of dealing with an inventory full of useless gear. It might have been wiser for someone to reject many of these ideas, yes, but it’s hard to imagine the game’s personality without this spirit of excess. The moments that make Biomutant worth playing, intermittent as they can be, exist not in spite of the game’s muddled identity but because of it, sitting right at the junction between its janky mechanics and outright bonkers fiction. After all, where else are you going to get the chance to punch a big fluffy kaiju in the heart?