Biomutant (2021, Playstation 4) Review

THE SUBLIME LONELINESS OF TOXIC FARTING

Also for: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series

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I'm once again in the situation of reviewing a game from a studio with ambitions too grand for their own good. I wish I'd known beforehand that the designers of Biomutant (a fledgling unit called Experiment 101) was a small studio of around 25 individuals. Knowing that, I might have gotten my expectations in check, or I might simply have stayed away from their kung-fu, open world fable entirely. 

You see, over the years I have seen countless examples of game developers biting off more than they can chew. One of the more recent and well-known cases is Cyberpunk 2077, which was far from finished upon release. In the case of Biomutant, the studio has tried to appease everyone by incorporating a tiny fraction of everything. Consequently everything feels skin-deep. I enjoy the game's playful aura. The imaginative visual design makes the trailers look neat and gorgeous, but partaking in the game itself doesn't live up to the hype.

To sustain its huge open world with activities, the developers have copy-pasted a lot of the content and spread it out thinly across the massive world, forcing you to butt through the same few scenarios time and time again. And in terms of writing, it weirdly tries to interweave three different storylines that don't mesh. Although it tries to convey some sort of grand statement, Biomutant has all the platitudes to make none of it register.

Unfortunately, there's simply too many ingredients to this stew; a revenge tale, an environmentalist fable, a cautionary tale about morality, a bunch of enemies to kill and hundreds of quest markers to pursue. It goes from straight-faced tragedy to the most silly naming conventions within the same line of dialogue. You might defeat an enemy attacking you with toxic farts, only to transition into a most beautiful, soothing orchestral score as you soak in the sun-drenched landscape around you. It's a game uncertain about its narrative direction, pulling you in all different directions at once.

After you're finally done with the game and the end credits start rolling, you've spent some 30-40 hours of grinding the same mechanics to dust, giving little thought as to why. And the most fun you had was scrounging for weapon parts and assembling them into something that gets the job done quicker. How does that relate to the story at hand? Hardly at all, although I admit I got into the groove eventually. But the groove was, at best, merely acceptable. 

In this tale, you take on the role of a mutated, anthropomorphic animal living on a biocontaminated Earth. The year is unspecified, and no humans remain. Instead their place in the food chain is taken by you and your mutated ilk, who are attempting to ape the behavior and leech on the inventions of the predecessors. The human legacy consists of the ruins and debris of the their civilization. It's like Fallout, but a lot more colorful and with some silly, childish overtones.

The whole ordeal is voiced by a narrator (David Shaw Parker), who translates the animal gibberish into English. Although his performance is good, the decision to reduce the voicework to a single actor removes all personality from the characters. This is made worse by the fact that his translation isn't word-for-word, but rather explains what the subject is talking about - e.g. "He wants to know why you're here" rather than "Why are you here?" - which denies the actor any possibility to add his own nuances. In the end all the NPC:s feel interchangeable and your connection to the world suffers.

You play as a vengeful lone wanderer, a ferret-looking martial arts master with a heavy blade, a gun and possibly magical powers, depending on your initial class selection. Your background story is explained in the overlong tutorial, that peppers you with lessons on different fighting techniques and leveling mechanics.

Apparently, some old beast named Lupa-Lupin murdered your parents while you were still young. The culprit still roams the lands and as the game begins you fight him in your first duel. Since you're not strong enough, it ends in your retreat, but don't worry - the last word is yet to be said.

The two other major mission objectives are (1) to save the world tree, whose protruding roots is being consumed by four giant world-eaters, and (2) settling the tribal wars between two factions of your race by defeating one of them. Along the way you'll stumble into loads of sidequests of the repetitive kind, often involving fetch-questing and boring non-puzzles. In a disappointingly simple moral system, the world is divided into light and dark actions, and the choices are so obvious it hurts. Your moral compass determines the outcome of the story, and your alignment rewards you with different PSI powers (a placeholder magical system that is perfectly skippable).

Technically, the game is very hit-or-miss. The open world exterior looks gorgeous, stretching out in a thousand directions with the tree of life in the dead center. Different biomes and hazards, like radioactivity and heat, are indicated by plain and clear color coding. No color on the palette is spared, making it clear that every facet of nature is reclaiming the planet.

The human-made interiors, on the other hand, look lifeless, both aesthetically and technically (they would look right at home in a mediocre PS3-game). They also suffer from the unimaginative copy-paste-affliction. As for the characters, I cannot quite come to terms with their design. They look uncanny. North of cartoony, south of realistic, they resemble something life-like, but not animals. They are more like cute toys with a violent streak.

Worst is the sound design, which is almost shockingly poor at times. As a weird counterpoint to the narrator who won't ever shut up, certain cutscenes are left almost completely mute. In-engine gameplay is accompanied with muffled sound effects that remove a lot of the punch from combat situations. The onomatopoeia appearing on-screen to enforce it (like "Bang!" or "Ka-blam!") annoy me. It suggests the possibility that the developers knew it was bad, and went for a half-baked visual fix to save the money and production time required to make an audio overhaul. As for the soundtrack, I like the music perfectly fine on its own, although it doesn't always fit the mood of the game. 

In its entirety, the soundscape of Biomutant is problematic, making it come across as a distanced tale filtered through the visual imagination of a young kid who lacks realistic auditory references. That being said, certain melodies are brilliant - maybe even more so when taken out of context.

Poor sound design also removes some of the combat immersion. It is often hard to determine whether you're hitting, missing or critting, unless you keep your eyes peeled for visual indicators. I've never in my life had to activate on-screen damage numbers to ascertain how well I'm doing. But with my ranged build, I had nothing else to go on apart from the enemy's miniscule, decreasing health bar.

Even so, I enjoyed combat, at least when tackling groups of enemies and making full use of the different combos and finishers. They're easy to learn, since all weapons and modes utilize the same button patterns. Chaining together three combos briefly unlocks a super "wung-fu mode" with a few devastating moves.

It's not to everyone's liking, for sure, but I found it a streamlined system reminiscent of the combat in the Yakuza-series. To top things off, the four world-eater bosses are fun to tackle. They force you to mix up your run-of-the-mill strategies a little, and they also evolve a little as you progress through the prolonged fight.

Most of all, Biomutant is ideal for people who like to tinker with loot and crafting. The broad range of melee and ranged weapon types can all be upgraded part-by-part. Close quarters weapons and armor can all be outfitted with different mods. Learning to love these mechanics is imperative to enjoying the exploration, since most drawers, boxes, lockers and toilet bowls contain different parts for crafting. As a side effect you end up looking kinda funny, kind of like a kid free to choose their own clothing would.

An open-world game would obviously feel incomplete without level progression, and Biomutant seems to incorporate it out of perceived necessity. It's the sorriest one I've seen in a while. You can level up certain skills in a wide variety of categories. But every tree only goes a few layers deep, and you can only access four quick commands at a time, which forces you to sideline a lot of them. I only used them sporadically, as a sense of obligation towards the designers.

In terms of polish, playing Biomutant feels far from an assuring, smooth time in the hands of expert craftsmen. It's a product of wildly erratic components stitched together, and constantly threatens to fall apart. The framerate drops, occasionally pausing entirely for about a second. The protagonist clips right through rubber tires and grass, only to hit invisible walls seconds later. Lines of programming code seep into the subtitles. The sound issues are awful throughout, whether by glitch or design. 

Still, the game never crashed. Instead it slowly won me over as I learned to accept its idiosyncracies and improved my skills. Maybe I got lucky - I decided to dump a lot of upgrade points in movement speed. Consequently, my character started moving around the world at an unparallelled pace that even made mounts redundant. Some areas, that are only traversable by vehicle, felt limiting as a result.

Although it crept up on me slowly, in the end that rush of increasing speed made exploration quite enjoyable, almost equalling games like Marvel's Spider-Man and AER: Memories of Old. It's a shame that it only served to get me through a string of identical locations without much worthwhile to find. The game world holds very little lore. I only found a handful of posters that prompted the narrator (giving voice to a tiny grasshopper automaton on your shoulder) to explain some tidbits of environmental disasters of ancient times.

But I pushed on, and some elements of humor lifted my spirits further. Things like giant creatures, ten times the size of the protagonist, clumsily trying to avoid my machine gun fire by dodgerolling. Or riding rockets on a wild chase through the air to blast a sealed metal door open. Also, wearing kids' clothes as armor is a bit comical. In the end, accepting this game for what it is made me tolerate it, although I wouldn't go so far as to label it "enjoyable".

Biomutant's an odd package. It seems to have gained a bit of a cult following, and if you're one of those that favor the "sandbox" aspect of an open world, it could provide a good time - especially at higher difficulty levels (my normal playthrough was too easy). As for people like myself - a story-nut and lore-hound with little spare time  - consider this review a cautionary tale about skin-deep timewasters.