Review | Biomutant (Switch) - Shoot, Slash, It’s All in the Mind!

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m getting older, but starting a game often feels like a monumental task to overcome. I find myself asking questions that sound eerily similar to someone in their 60s asking how to copy and paste, or what a mouse is. The questions come in at a rapid pace as I try to get my bearings. 

“What is going on with this UI?” “What button does what again?” “Combos? Who the hell is capable of remembering combos?” Some games handle onboarding better than others and Biomutant lands somewhere in the middle. 

I wouldn’t come to this realization until much later in the game, but the way the game guides new players proved to be a microcosm for the game as a whole. There are certain things that are done well and certain things that are not, but despite the lack of finesse, there is a charm that is downright admirable and difficult to ignore.

Story

The story of Biomutant is the weakest part of the game. It has a lot of moving parts and feels unnecessarily bloated, but is simultaneously serviceable. The game starts off with your rodent main character - whom you will soon start customizing - being chased by a large and foreboding mammalian antagonist. You barely escape and then play a portion of that cinematic sequence in what amounts to the game’s first tutorial. 

From there, you are introduced to the voice of a narrator who begins telling the tale of this post-apocalyptic world, which ultimately amounts to energy resources being poorly managed and leading to pollution and the decay of the Tree-of-Life. You can see literal pollution throughout the world that is contributing to the decay and also four large creatures called World Eaters (more on that later) that are directly destroying the Tree-of-Life by consuming its roots.

Biomutant tries to weave a revenge tale - with the aforementioned mammalian antagonist - throughout the main plot of the decay of the Tree-of-life, and neither one clicked with me all that much.

Throughout the game, you meet tribes that have differing views about how the decay of the Tree-of-Life should be handled, which amounts to either allowing and contributing to its decay and starting the world over or saving it and others in the process. You are encouraged to align with a specific tribe and then unite them by taking over their corresponding forts throughout the world.

There is also a morality system that isn’t explained very well and feels unnecessary most of the time, save for the decision of which tribe to align with and a decision made at the very end of the game. It's worth noting that I decided to save the Tree-of-Life and I have no idea how the quests change if you decide to destroy it. Eat your heart out, completionists!

Looting And Crafting

Look at this beautiful monstrosity

The bread and butter of Biomutant involves exploring the world and finding loot that allows you to not only become more powerful, but also to make your character and weapons look absolutely bonkers in the process. The loot you find is colour-coded based on rarity and is reminiscent of what you would see in Fortnite; it even has a similar sound effect that plays when you open up a container that contains loot.

I spent the majority of the game wearing a ridiculous duck helmet and a plaid skirt that I just kept modifying through crafting supplies obtained throughout the world or via dismantling duplicate or unwanted loot obtained previously. Because you can modify the different parts of weapons with items that you find in the world, I made a shotgun near the end of the game that inflicted radioactive damage on enemies and looked like a bastardisation of a shotgun and a crossbow. It was so damn stupid and I loved it.

Sure, I don’t love the way the crafting economy is handled and I would have appreciated some quality-of-life adjustments - such as being able to dismantle multiple items at a time - but I appreciated the charm it added to the game and the way it allowed me to insert aspects of my own personality to make my experience feel unique.

Combat

He’s friend shaped.

Combat encounters are mostly enjoyable, but they do get repetitive as the game progresses. You are able to unlock specific powers that can be triggered in combat and chained together. This combined with the ability to add specific status effects to weapons (cold, fire, biohazard, electricity, radiation) does try to keep things interesting. It was never clear to me if the status effects caused increased damage to specific enemies and it feels like a missed opportunity to add strategy to combat encounters.

The World Eater boss fights were my second favourite aspect of Biomutant as they provided a spectacle that wasn’t present in other aspects of the game. If fighting aggressive, ugly creatures while riding a mammalian mount and a jet ski or while piloting a mech and a mechanical jellyfish sounds cool, that’s because it is. The boss fights mostly amount to shooting or using your melee weapon in the way that you do in the other combat encounters throughout the game, but I felt there were enough different things on offer to make the boss encounters special.

Exploration

Yeah… he wants to eat you.

Four different biomes in the world require specific suits to traverse them without dying - cold zones, heat zones, hypoxia zones, and radioactive zones. 

I took the time to obtain the cold zone suit and the heat zone suit and these side quests offered mini-boss fights that felt refreshingly different from other mini-bosses found via exploration of the open world. 

Additionally, the suits allowed me the opportunity to explore new areas that provided rare loot, so the quests to obtain the suits felt worth the overall time investment and I would encourage players to take the time to obtain all of the suits.

I spent hours exploring dilapidated buildings - sometimes while riding a mount, most of the time not - and scavenging for resources I could use for the next gun abomination and I have no regrets whatsoever. Sometimes I would do it with my favorite podcast playing in the background and I truly felt like I was in the zone.

Performance

'Give me Psyduck or give me death!

Lastly, we have to talk about the performance. I am delighted to report that it’s not bad at all, and this is before the day 1 patch! The reality is that this game is running on Switch hardware that was relatively old when it was released in 2017, which makes it ancient in 2024.

In what is typical for many third-party Switch games, there are frame drops and stutters and issues with flat/muddy textures with texture pop-in as well. That said, the frame rate appears to be a stable 30fps and loading times are minimal unless you die and then you can expect to wait up to a minute for your last save to load. If you are sensitive to these issues then look away or wait for patches.

I had one moment where the game closed unexpectedly and multiple moments where quest markers were bugged, but the important thing to note is that none of this impacted my overall enjoyment of the game.

Biomutant is a game that deserves your attention despite the fact that it rarely demands it. The game’s scope is impressive, especially when you consider that it is a brand-new IP made by a small team. The combat options lack weight and there is jank throughout, but it isn’t often that a game allows me to explore an open world looking like a messed up Psyduck and fight giant bosses while piloting a mechanical jellyfish.

Biomutant has a certain charm that I've struggled to find elsewhere and I am confident that you can have fun if you are equipped with an open mind and modest expectations.