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amazon Biomutant reviews
Biomutant – Since its publication in 2017, Biomutant has been nothing more than a modern-day fable as for the next three years, all we know about it are “open-world” clichés, “post-apocalyptic”, “Devil May Cry for the furry” and vague ideas about how mutant creatures playing the Kung Fu system look like.
Fans are probably not very impressed with the game itself, but they are much more interested in the story of how a 20-person development team was able to come up with a product on the scale of Ubisoft.
And perhaps that is also the biggest point when we talk about Biomutant. A game produced for more than… half a decade with a tiny development team, green-lit by a giant who always nods to every idea they want to cram into it in the spirit of “game maker” Independent is an artist, but artists need creative freedom.
Everyone likes wants and sees the success story of an “underdog”!
And that’s it, the Biomutant we got in May 2021 is a game with a lot of stuff when it comes to a lot of excitement – a high-speed action game akin to Devil May Cry mixed with Max. Payne with an open world as large as Skyrim, with a clan system, branching conversations, character ethics, crafting, horseback riding, boss fights, and you can also fight with… a carrot radioactive contamination.
And as familiar as the above popular promotional phrases, Biomutant joins the ranks of famous games with the quality of “as wide as the ocean, as deep as a puddle”.
While wishing we were “vomiting” to a glut of post-apocalyptic open-world games, Biomutant offers a new experience: playing a post-apocalyptic open-world game in the form of a hairy mutant that looks a bit like the original. Totoro’s evil twin.
Remember the meme Noah complaining about the elephant-headed penguin in Family Guy?
That’s the only way that the writer can explain where our main character comes from, just change the elephant and penguin to cat/mouse/lazy/garbage-eating panda, mistake, raccoon.
That’s the first part of Biomutant called ‘choose how ugly you are’, followed by ‘choose your useless rate’.
You choose bodybuilding to measure blood volume, agility, and brain iodine levels which are important in action RPGs, and then we have… Charisma, a stat that is only useful in games play allows you to complete with cursing culture.
A little “spoiler”: in Biomutant it is only used to convince a few leaders of the sect to lower their swords if you can’t convince them… solve it by traditional “collision”!
That’s it, asking the player if he wants to increase Charisma during the initial phase of Biomutant’s character creation is like a doctor asking a newborn baby if he wants to have a shrimp allergy, every time he becomes a vegetarian!
Charisma isn’t the only thing Biomutant has included to fill the list of “games that have all these features!!”.
You can notice from the above paragraph that the game has a clan system. What do you do when you take a side? Take over the territory of the other faction. One faction wants to find a way to save the great tree of life and destroy the Worldeater monsters, the other side wants to eliminate all other factions.
Before you ask the question, choosing a faction does not bring about moral challenges or anything humane, it just affects the yin-yang tendency leading to two outcomes that finish as white and black as possible.
The most weighty option is probably choosing to make peace with all the factions after defeating the second faction in the main storyline, mainly because it will save your time.
To be able to enjoy the content of Biomutant, go to Settings -> Audio -> switch the “Gibberish” and “Narrator” settings in the Dialogue section to “Off”.
Reason? Because there is a 50% chance that you will go crazy if you play Biomutant without “locking up” all the characters in the game, including the narrator.
The game implements the dialogues in a way that deserves… put the Oscar statue in his mouth: the character completes a line (according to the language), then the game displays subtitles with the narrator’s English narration, just Not only is it a silly waste of time for dialogue that the player doesn’t need to listen to, it also requires pressing “Skip” twice just to fast-forward a single sentence.
Turn off the volume of these conversations and you’ll be able to follow Biomutant’s story at the pace you want, and to be honest… it’s not bad at all.
We have a battle for territory between factions, a personal story related to the hunt for the person who killed the parent of the main character in the past, and then a big tree with roots in all directions is volunteered by you to become its savior.
Between them are the finer details that come from the uncanny familiarity of a world that looks human but belongs to an alien race, and its inhabitants nostalgic, searching for relief, shaken honor, superstitious like humans but in a different primitive institution.
However, it is all very difficult to “swallow” when the game presents excessively cumbersome content with an unnecessary amount of dialogue, especially in the early stages when the player is not familiar with the reasons for the pleasure it brings.
Long conversations aren’t the only “reluctant stops” that Biomutant forces you to pull over. The game will always try to stop you and play small cutscenes with close-ups of each NPC your first encounter, a mini-boss that just broke through the door to the outpost you’re capturing, or simply a place you are approaching.
During a boss battle, the game will also stop only to… zoom in on the boss jumping on the wall, signaling the transition to the stage where the player can only dodge its ranged attack but cannot fight back!
Even the game will “whistle” when displaying a game guide (tooltip), and the most horrifying thing is… its persistent instruction is proportional to the amount of game mechanics it boasts.
Take for example “loot” and crafting mechanics. Biomutant avoids a major drawback of games of the same genre which is the number of “toys” that you can find innumerable, regardless of quality, type, or characteristics.
where can you get a Biomutant online
Biomutant – PlayStation 4 Standard Edition: Buy it now
Biomutant (Xbox One): Buy it now
It has very few weapon samples that you can directly get, but instead, the game encourages you to find rare materials to craft the weapon you want.
Creating your radioactive hammer is pretty cool, but the problem is: that even with 4 types of weapons, the player’s fighting style in Biomutant remains the same.
From the outside, you might see that Biomutant has a quick combat mechanism, reminiscent of Devil May Cry, but it is weak, lacks weight, and resembles Batman Arkham but looks more clumsy than giants “cosplay bat” many.
Since the game doesn’t have a target lock feature, the protagonist will… propel himself towards the target with an invisible force, and the player simply needs to press the X button (and sometimes the Y button), press LB to counter the attack, B to dodge and we have gameplay that tests the nerve of the right thumb, with very little variety in combos.
The sound of weapons hitting enemies sounds like… slurping instant noodles, unclear character animations, and poor visual effects that completely take away the weight of each hit. The game also doesn’t have a visual hint when an enemy is out of the screen about to iron, throw a stone or shoot a gun at you, thanks to the camera’s inability to zoom in on itself, so you’ll have to struggle with an analog stick just to not get “unjustly beaten” from one of the 180 angles on the back of my neck.
In addition to melee, you can also shoot guns and use Psi abilities like lightning or create an ice background that makes enemies slide away from you.
Psi is only an auxiliary agent, not able to revive a boring combat system, and shooting only stops at simple acrobatic Gun-Fu phases.
Also because there is no target lock function, shooting is also a “wrestle” with the camera when you have to use your index finger to both dodge and … look while discharging bullets.
The combat is so poorly balanced that due to the lack of proper enemy animations, it is easy for you to “hit” without reacting, making the optimal strategy sometimes… running around the army and firing bullets to kill them one by one.
Unlike combat, exploration of Biomutant is repetitive but less boring. The game clearly shows that this is the game of the former Just Cause developers with the number of side quests that require collecting a certain type of item a lot to want to “take a breather”, as well as the way the game displays a list of items in the area to see if you are “completed” exploring the place.
The orange-tinted cupboards will satisfy your rummage for a while until you realize the areas of Biomutant stop there: providing a checklist to tick like chores! Areas with harsh environments such as radiation or biological substances also only act as a timer, playing in it for too long to die, but do not contain any significant good gameplay!
However, the saddest thing when it comes to Biomutant is not every detail that is done “half”, but the fact that this should be what we have when a world role-playing game opening is done under humble vision.
Experiment 101 took 6 years with a team comfortably creating their “dream game”, only to create an experience that took only 10 hours and 16 minutes to realize it was as shallow as the Platte River.
Certainly, Biomutant will find a passionate fanbase of its own, but the writer can hardly admit that the potential it misses is too unfortunate…