Biomutant | PS4 Review

It always hurts to be disappointed by a game you were looking forward to. Biomutant caught my eye immediately after its initial unveiling about four years ago. The post-post-apocalypse is a favorite setting of mine, and the idea that animals had mutated into sentience is something I found exceptionally intriguing. The combat in the trailers was filled with colorful comic book flavoring and fueled by fast and frenetic action. Yet, Biomutant squanders nearly all of this potential.

Destiny is Yours

You’ll start the game by creating your character from scratch. This is far more robust than I would’ve expected, and it goes beyond simply choosing your class. Your preferred attributes can affect your appearance some, but ultimately it’s up to you to decide how you want to look. You can even change your fur patterns and colorings, and it’s a ton of fun making your own little furry action hero. It makes for a great first impression as the game begins.

The first thing you’ll notice after booting the game is the ever-present narrator. As you play, a charming older gentleman narrates everything happening to and around your character. It’s a cute gimmick at first, but it grows tiresome quickly. David Shaw Parker does a great job with what he’s given, but he’s one of only three voices you’ll hear the entire game. There’s also the good and evil consciences on your shoulder, but they show up rather infrequently and repeat a lot of dialogue. Those two show up for moral decisions, but making moral decisions felt bland and superfluous from the beginning of the game all the way to the end.

So you’re mostly hearing the one voice. While you’re exploring the world, he’ll constantly be chiming in with fairly useless thoughts. Luckily, this can be mitigated somewhat by turning down a slider in the options menu. However, this is not where the narrator truly fails us. No, that’s within the dialogue exchanges.

Hey Google, Please Translate

Every character you interact with speaks in gibberish, and then the narrator will translate it for you. I can see how this makes some sense considering every character is a furry little creature, but them speaking English (or any real-world language) really would not have been jarring. But it’s not even specifically what they’re saying being translated to you, only a summary. Things like “Needs food.” or “Wants you to find a cave.” It’s irritating at the best of times. It disallows any character to stand out or make any kind of impact. You can guess at a summary of their personality by their outfit, but they can’t actually have a personality because they have no words. Even a small tweak like having the narrator translate their direct words might’ve helped, but that never happens here.

Making matters excruciating is that the character must speak in gibberish first, and then have it separately translated. It slows every conversation to a crawl, and makes them at least twice as long as they need to be. Worse yet, if you think you can just skip past the gibberish, joke’s on you! If you try to, it will present you with the subtitle of the narrator’s upcoming speech, but you still have to wait for the gibberish to play out before the audio file will move on. It’s a frankly bizarre decision that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Perhaps playing the gibberish quietly in the background as the narrator speaks could’ve helped speed things up, but it wouldn’t help in making you care about any of these characters.

Paint by Numbers

If I seem to be hammering home on this, it’s only because Biomutant is strangely story-focused. For consisting of a cast entirely incapable of having speech or character, it’s befuddling that such an emphasis is placed on the story. Especially when it’s so bland and rote. Your village was attacked when you were a child, you now have some form of amnesia, and you need revenge on the creature that attacked your home. There’s also a world-ending threat that needs averting, which sets up for some boss battles. There’s no problem in having a story riddled with cliches, but that puts the emphasis on your characters needing to stand out. And the structure of the dialogue makes that utterly impossible.

So the story is completely wasted, but at least the setting is extraordinary. It’s colorful and varied throughout its massive open-world environments, and the structures create a lot of desire to explore vertically, as well. This is truly when Biomutant hits its stride the most. Just walking around with the curiosity of what crazy creature you’ll see next is a thrill. Eventually you’ll learn that there are only a handful of structure types in the game, and they repeat often and identically. Every bunker will funnel you into a room with a chain link fence, where a hole will be in the same spot, with a lootable sack waiting against the wall. Every. Single. Time. This sort of environmental repetition normally wouldn’t bother me at all, but then again most games dress everything in narrative, and that can’t be done here.

You are the One

For combat being such a major focus, it’s yet another area where Biomutant disappoints. The gunplay is actually somewhat solid, but the aiming can feel floaty thanks to the game’s soft lock-on system. You can shoot dodge in slow-motion and there’s an active reload, both or which are always cool. It all looks pretty slick with the comic book stylings, as well.

Melee combat is quite a bit rougher. The lack of a lock-on hurts things, and there’s very little sense of impact. Every combo attack needs to be unlocked, and every weapon has its own unlockable combos, even if the button combination is the same between them. It’s another bizarre choice, as it leaves you playing for hours without the ability to even perform a combo. Hell, if you upgrade the wrong way you may never have access to combos at all. 

There’s a “Super Wung-Fu” mode that must be activated by using three different combos in a single combat encounter, but it’s not worth the trouble. The game makes a huge deal of it, but you’ll quickly wonder why. Doing three different combos feels like running down a checklist, which is not a thrill at all. The special attacks “Super Wung-Fu” unlock are weak as hell, outside of the occasionally useful area attack.

A Dress for Every Gun

The customizable weapons and armor get a lot of attention in Biomutant. There are many, many options for each piece of equipment. This system is actually pretty engaging for a lot of the runtime, and you’ll soon put together a 7-star weapon. At that point, combat becomes unbelievably easy, and you can probably kill most mini-bosses within a combo or two. It might have sapped the fun out of combat, if combat was fun to begin with.

The last thing Biomutant really brings to the table is its vehicles. There are the standard open-world sort of mounts, but you’ll also get a customizable mech and motorboat. These are both cool, fun, and something quite different. There are two additional vehicle types that are short-lived, since you don’t get to keep them. These four vehicles are tied into the four major boss fights, and it was actually pretty novel and a welcome change of pace.

Disappointment

I hated writing this review. I’ve looked forward to Biomutant ever since its initial debut. I mean, just look at it! Those character designs and that world are so damn cool and interesting, but they’re wasted here. That’s Biomutant’s greatest crime: it squandered one of the coolest settings in recent years. As it stands, there’s very little here worth investing your time in, and that breaks my heart to have to say.

To hear me talk more about Biomutant, be sure to listen to Episode 347 of The Gaming Outsider Podcast around the 44:50 time stamp.

This review is based on a PS4 copy of Biomutant provided by Evolve PR for coverage purposes. It’s also available on Xbox One and Windows PC.