Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is a fantastic, original Netflix animated series about humans and mutants living together in a bold, beautiful, post-apocalyptic world. Ghost of Tsushima, one of the best video game releases of 2020, saw a lone samurai warrior roaming an open-world setting, gaining new skills and knowledge while questing to honor his family's legacy. I never expected a video game mash-up of those two titles to even exist let alone function, but Biomutant has managed to do just that. The THQ Nordic game from in-house developer Experiment 101 absolutely oozes with charm (and other bodily fluids) in a wild-type mutant mash-up of RPG genres that somehow, beyond all reason, stands apart as a very, very unique thing.
As the official synopsis paints it, "Biomutant is an open-world, post-apocalyptic Kung-Fu fable RPG, with a unique martial arts styled combat system allowing you to mix melee, shooting, and mutant ability action." That's all true. What the game does best is deliver a beautiful, lush world that's still poisoned in most parts by the toxic past of the long-gone human civlization, allowing creatively mutated anthropomorphic animals to run wild. The character/creature creation options are outdone only by the insane amount of gear crafting opportunities with which to experiment. Unfortunately, thanks to a wonkified progression system that sees you quickly achieving demigod status, underbaked combat mechanics that suck the challenge out of even the biggest battles, and a misunderstanding of what min/max gamers are looking for, Biomutant ends up doing much better on style than it does on substance. Spoilers ahead.
Let me start out by doing a quick expectations check: If you're expecting Biomutant to revolutionize the video game industry, if you think the relatively small Devs team of Experiment 101 is going to break out of every possible box, or if you're looking for a novel experience, tip-to-tail, like no other before it, you're going to be disappointed. If, however, you're looking for a beautifully designed game that's delightfully weird, unafraid of some gross-out humor, and fully in on delivering a fun kitchen-sink experience, you might just be pleasantly surprised. Biomutant doesn't reinvent the wheel, it merely borrows component parts of it from other successful forebears; but it also does so with style by splashing neon paint on that wheel and sticking sharp points on every available part of it for maximum impact.
The official synopsis doesn't really tell you much about the story. That's okay, because Biomutant itself will hit you over the head with its repetitive themes throughout. Essentially, in a world that's moved on from humans but is still feeling the effects of their polluting ways, you play a skilled martial arts hero-in-training caught up among tribes which are now on the brink of all-out war. The choice now falls to you of whom to side with, whether it's the tribes who value strength above all else or those who take pride in peace and unity. (For transparency's sake, I chose Dark Side for my playthrough, just to be a little different.) That decision will ultimately lead you to one of two different endings in the somewhat branching story of Biomutant. And it will determine whether or not you save or sacrifice the all-important World Tree.
Yes, there's a bit more to Biomutant's story than your solo kung-fu journey; you'll ultimately decide the fate of the post-apocalyptic world and its future, through strength or unity. I'll leave that to your playthrough to see how it all works out. But along the way, you'll be aided in your journey by not just quest-givers in the open-world RPG but by the many and varied aspects of Biomutant's gameplay itself. We're talking class skills with weapon and attribute variation, magical powers granted by DNA-altering mutations, crafting of both out-of-this-world weapons and highly stylized armor and gear, combo switching from melee to ranged to magic and back again, mechs, mounts, and more! To explain a bit more about how the many and varied aspects of Biomutant work, THQ Nordic released this handy explanation video ahead of the game's release tomorrow, May 25th:
Unfortunately, while all of the things they mention in that explanation trailer are there and they (mostly) work as intended, there ends up being very little weight to any of them. They just don't ultimately seem to matter all that much. So, for example, you can start out by focusing on a melee build with strength and a tanky vitality as your Class buffs. You can tweak those buffs even further thanks to the character creator that allows for a spectrum of physical apperances and related stat buffs/debuffs. You might even enjoy your first dozen or so combat rounds as you wail on enemies with your customized beating stick. (The combat itself is fun enough but repetitive, with a questionable weighlessness to melee strikes and an apparent lack of manual targeting over all.) But as soon as you realize that ranged attacks get the job done faster and far more safely, you might want to switch over to some more distance-friendly perks. The good news is that you can, because Biomutant has baked a bunch of flexibility into its design. But the inherent flaw in that approach is that your initial choices don't really matter, there are no pain points countering each of your perks, and everything eventually flattens out to a middling experience.
While Biomutant will undoubtedly draw comparisons to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for inumerable reasons, since we're in RPG territory, I want to point out how class, perk, skill, and mutation systems like those in Fallout and The Outer Worlds work so much better. Those games present you with very clear pluses and minuses when it comes to choosing a given bonus over an obvious detriment; you make your choice and live with it (or die, as the case may be) with few opportunities to hit the Undo button. That's a great design because it forces you as the player to make tough decisions and deal with the consequences, but it also opens up nearly unlimited replayability. Biomutant absolutely wanted to encourage that level of replayability judging purely by its character-creation options, number of available classes, huge variety of weapons, types of magical abilities and environmental resistances, combos of all of the above, and more, but its limited story scope, reptitive cycles of quests and combat, and a laughable lack of a challenge posed by otherwise impressively designed boss encounters drastically limits my desire to jump back in and try another build. There's simply not enough of a difficulty curve here to require stat checks, spreadsheets, or brainy gameplay beyond simply smacking something with a heavy stick to watch it crumble; rinse and repeat.
However, Biomutant goes above and beyond when it comes to charm and charisma. So even if you may eventually tire of the narrator future-speaking their way through the story or having your character pee on a fast-travel marker for the 100th time, if its humor and comedic timing tickles you, you're going to be in for a fun ride. I particularly loved the flashback sequences and meeting the oversized and oddly scaled characters in this journey, even if these sections were filled with fetch-quest missions and platitudes often delivering nothing much of value or novelty. The occasional bugs along the way (mostly puzzle-related in my playthrough) had me questioning both my character's abilities and my own as a game player, all understandably frustrating. But boy does Biomutant hit you with some weirdness at the most unexpected moments. That's almost worth the price of admission right there (though, for transparency, THQ Nordic comp'd us a review copy of this game.) So while I don't expect the clunky combat and underbaked progression system to be fixed in the Day One patch (which is coming), I do look forward to seeing what kinds of bonkers character creations gamers come up with and how they make their way across the toxified landscape.
All in all, Biomutant is a fun and stylish game that offers a lot of creativity up front but doesn't always deliver a satisfyingly challenging and rewarding experience in the long haul. It's worth a look and worth a playthrough, just don't expect a game-changer.
Rating: C