![]() ![]() Set in a world that has survived an environmental apocalypse courtesy of the Toxanol Corporation, whose disregard for the planet’s health led to the end of civilisation, Biomutant presents a fairly dark story that often feels at odds with its attempts at humour and levity. In fact there’s a lot of Biomutant I still don’t fully understand. At least I think it’s the automaton who’s supposed to be talking. ![]() A chirpy little automaton is an ever-present companion, ready to fight beside you (sort of), and narrate everything in the voice of a kindly uncle. A little checklist accompanies each new area, helpfully marking off anything you find until you’re told the area is complete and you know there’s nothing else to search for. ![]() You can’t run for more than 30 seconds in any direction without coming upon another abandoned intersection, dilapidated house, underground bunker or secret vault. Rarely outside a Ubisoft sandbox have I seen a map so densely packed with places to explore and secrets to uncover. A lack of weight to the melee combat leaves the experience looking pretty but feeling hollow, and despite trying to engage with it in a meaningful way on multiple occasions I struggled to see any encounter as more than an obstacle between me and Biomutant’s beautiful, loot-filled world. You’ll rarely take a solid hit, let alone die. There’s an argument here that things are only as fun as you make them, and I suppose you could throw caution to the wind and wade in with your dukes up, but there’s absolutely no penalty for circle-strafing every single enemy while shooting them until they catapult off in slow motion. The free-class system allows you to pump points into whichever stat you like, and so by around 10 hours in I’d ditched the dual blades for a whacking great sword that poisoned my enemies, and a rifle that I haven’t had to swap out for the 25 hours since equipping it. Yes, you can flip about the place and employ a form of magic, and yes there’s more slow motion action than Zack Snyder filming a fight between two OAPs in a vat of treacle, but there’s rarely anything to force you to use your entire arsenal. It’s nice to be cartwheeling around bad guys and seamlessly mixing melee and ranged combat, but it’s nicer when you can feel the impact of each blow and sadly, Biomutant just doesn’t deliver punchy, exciting combat. Because while Biomutant’s combat definitely looks great in trailers, in practice it’s a little less impressive. Much noise has been made about Biomutant’s combat being based loosely on the frenetic bloodletting in Devil May Cry, and I can certainly see the similarities there, in the same way I can see the similarities between the driving in Forza and the driving in Crash Team Racing. Thing is, it doesn’t matter much, because it doesn’t take long to realise that one thing Experiment 101 weren’t interested in was creating a challenge. ![]() The classes on offer represent the usual RPG fare such as the Commando who does more damage with rifles and the Psi-Freak, who can wield Biomutant’s form of magic like a wizard. My little white and blue rat-rabbit only took a few minutes to create, as I was quite happy to sling all my initial points into Vitality and Agility and select the Saboteur class, because dual-wielding makeshift guns and blades sounded cool. Your first task is to create a custom rodent-like hero from a bunch of presets which you can then fine tune with sliders. From the moment you open up the character creation screen, it begins hurling silly words and nonsensical terms at you and it rarely stops. Biomutant: An RPG filled to bursting pointīut if Biomutant is living proof of anything, it’s that there really is such a thing as too much of a muchness. From the outset you’re populating your map with flashing icons, and you’ll still be finding new stuff after 20 hours. Evidently Experiment 101 at some point held a brainstorming session during which someone switched all the waters with high-sugar energy drinks and hid the board rubbers. Like, a massive amount, but I hasten to add that I cannot knock the ambition behind Biomutant. My point here is that there is a lot of stuff to do in Biomutant. With every firm but light-hearted smack across its papier-mache arse it spewed out more little treats and tidbits and brightly-coloured flashy things, and the more it spewed, the more I hit it, and the more I hit it, the more queasy I became, and yet I found I couldn’t stop ’til I’d beaten it into a shredded pulp and gorged myself on its offerings until the room was spinning. As I ploughed my way through Biomutant and its mass of oddly saccharine content I couldn’t help but equate Experiment 101’s sprawling RPG with a big, colourful piñata. ![]()
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