Close your eyes and recall the narrating voice and style of Little Big Planet or Dungeons 3. Now, in your mind’s eye visualize Kung Fu Panda, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Breath of the Wild, and Devil May Cry. Congratulations, you’ve just experienced THQ Nordic and Experiment 101’s new game, Biomutant!

Biomutant is an Action Role-Playing Game (ARPG) that brings together familiar elements of other open-world adventure titles, while also adding its own quirky and unique flair to the genre. It’s a large and impressive undertaking when you consider this is the studio’s first game, and they only had 20 employees behind it!

Story

The game is set in a far distant future, after the world as we know it has ended (due to significant environmental pollution). The planet has recreated itself upon the backs of mutated and evolved rodent-like creatures, of which your character belongs.

Central to the story, there’s a massive tree called the Tree of Life that gives life and purpose to the world’s living things. Everything you choose to do revolves around the outcome of this tree, all determined by the choices you make. Ultimately you may choose to either defeat the four bosses, “World Eaters,” or allow them to devour the tree.

There are other keys to this story, such as seeking retribution for the murder of a family member and eventually aligning yourself with one of the six tribes who divide the game’s territories. Early on you will play through a flashback of your childhood, a young ronin who is just beginning to learn the ways of Wung Fu. Your Mooma (Mother) is a master of Wung Fu and also your mentor. This short prologue provides more backstory and depth to your character (as well as others you will encounter) and sets the stage for the epic journey ahead.

Gameplay

You begin your journey by using a unique character creation “genetic code” sequencing that essentially allows you to mutate your character’s stats and appearance. You’ll choose between strengths and weaknesses in Intellect, Charisma, Vitality, Strength, and Agility. Each of those core abilities has subcategories that are influenced, such as your melee damage, health, move speed, energy regeneration, or loot chances.

After settling on your core stats, you select your specific “breed” among the six options available. Each of these breeds further influences your abilities and appearance, thus setting the stage for a game that is jam-packed with customization and crafting options.

Lastly, you’ll pick one of the character classes, five in total unless you pay extra to unlock the sixth “Mercenary” class. Once you’ve chosen your character design and stats, you’ll set off into a massive and beautiful world full of quests, creatures, combat, and a fair amount of gameplay bloat.

As a mutated rodent who specializes in the martial art of Wung Fu, you hack n’ slash, shoot, and psi-attack your way through a huge variety of enemies and diverse landscapes. It’s truly an enormous and colorful world packed full of enemy encounters and battles. The game’s combat is a bit of a double-edged sword, pun intended. It offers numerous options to defeat your enemies, yet whichever weapon or ability you use generally seems irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. I was really hoping all the crafting of weapons and armor, as well as the selection of skills and abilities, would be more meaningful in combat situations. In the end, I could usually get away with being lazy and careless in battle. It’s easy to do in a game this long!

I can’t emphasize enough that there are a lot of customization and crafting options that influence your character look, and weapon and armor load-outs. There are also quite a few skills and abilities you can unlock throughout your journey. Likewise, there are frequent encounters where you can choose between light and dark (good and evil) that change the story and your interactions with its characters. There’s a lot going on and plenty to do, even if a great deal of it eventually becomes monotonous and unnecessary.

Audio/Visuals

The music and narrator help set the tone for an epic adventure that never takes itself too seriously. The visuals complement this with their gorgeous design, attention to detail, creative landscape, and quirky biodiversity. It really is a joy to explore this gigantic map and see everything it has to offer. In some ways I found exploration to be one of the highlights of the overall game experience. It provided a stunning and immersive world, full of color and variation. Hands down, the world’s design gets top marks.

Regarding the audio experience, I can’t gloss over the narration. If you’ve ever played Little Big Planet or Dungeons 3, you will recall each has a lighthearted male narrator, with a pleasant English accented voice. Biomutant follows this narration style to cover all the game’s dialogue, notes, tips, and encounters. The frequent narration may be annoying to some, hence the ability to moderate his voice in the options menu.

I didn’t mind the general narrations, but I do wish many of the less-important conversations were cut shorter. It really slows the pace of the game when you’re frequently stopping for extended periods of time to work through dialogue options and conversations. It’s charming and cute at first but becomes overkill in a game of this length.

Replayability

This game offers a highly customizable experience, allowing players a plethora of choices in character creation, classes, weapons, armor, upgrades, and crafting. It allows for you to experiment and try different paths, combat styles, and ultimately even experience different ending outcomes. This will easily occupy several dozen hours of your time during your first playthrough, even longer if choose to do every available side quest.

All the character designs, weapon and skill combinations, and story choices make this game highly replayable. However, the slow pace, over-used dialogue and narration, and grinding of repetitive quests really hamper one’s desire to revisit this world. There are just certain elements that overstay their welcome and distract from what is otherwise a fantastic world to experience.

What It Could Have Done Better

This game would have benefited from a more varied selection of quest types. The issue here wasn’t quantity but rather a lack of diversity in these quest experiences. They too often felt like fluff and time fillers. I would have loved to see more creative side quests with spin-off stories that provide immersion in the world and characters rather than saturation in busy-work.

The combat was generally fun and smooth, but the lack of challenging enemies held back the overall combat experience. The sheer quantity of weapons, armor, crafting, skills, and ability options allow for a wide variety of gameplay experiences. That said, so much of it just feels inconsequential due to the rather simplistic enemies and ease in which you can button-mash into victory. For all the options available to you in this game, none feel truly necessary to defeat most foes. If the enemies had more depth, requiring you to learn and adapt your technique and approach, it would have allowed the combat to really shine.

Finally, I’ll quickly revisit the point that the game’s dialogue is too much. I don’t mind the frequent voiceover narration as I play through, as long as it doesn’t interrupt the flow and pace of gameplay. The lengthy pauses for conversations and dialogue options ultimately just feels interruptive and overwhelming. I’m sure the aim here was to immerse you in the story, but in effect it was mostly just distracting. I would have appreciated more streamlined conversations that got to the point quicker.

Verdict

This is a creative, unique, quirky, and really fun experience at first. Ultimately though, the game trips over itself at times and neglects some important gameplay elements. I believe the game would have benefited by being less ambitious in certain nonessential areas and far more diversified in questing and combat. Too many parts feel repetitive, grindy, and inconsequential. The combat isn’t engaging enough to keep your attention for a game this length.

These shortcomings aside, Biomutant is truly a beautiful world, designed with great detail and charm. I hope this isn’t the last we see of this world. It has the recipe to be quite special, if they can find a way to introduce changes on a smaller scale and scope to address core issues. Perhaps through DLC releases, we’ll eventually see changes that provide new and challenging combat situations, along with more diverse questing. They don’t need to be lengthy, but instead simply drop the new enemy types and combat scenarios across the existing map and provide more varied quests. In the end, that’s what we really wanted from this gorgeous and colorful bio-world.  

Biomutant is now available to play on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. If you want to see more, be sure to check out some of their recent gameplay trailers!