Ruby McKenzie
Is the Biomutant game over hyped? Well today I am going to be bringing you my review of Biomutant, the game that many has been waiting for after hearing about it so many times.
About Biomutant Game
So Biomutant was announced way back in 2017 actually and it’s developed by experiment 101 published by THQ Nordic and is a very unique game with a lot of unique concepts but before we get into that a couple of things one, I like to review games after I 100% them simply because I feel like it gives more credibility but more so because it separates us from other reviewers. Moreover, there won’t really be any spoilers for this game because all of the promotion for the game basically did the spoiling just to come out and say it. There’s not that much of a story for the game besides what was shown off in the promotional stuff which is k!ll the four World Leaders, solve the tribe war and hopefully save the tree of life, that is the main story, all of which was told to us by experiment 101 for marketing. So just something to keep in mind there I suppose.
Now Biomutant is an open world the kind of exploration-based RPG. The main goal of which again is to save the tree of life, it is actually possible to fail at doing so now the explanation I heard from some of the marketing material was that basically you have to kill the four world leaders that part’s kind of mandatory and you have to solve the tribe war, how you solve the tribe war as long as your characters Aura which is kind of like a karma system like good or bad, as well as whether or not you complete certain side quests, all affects a percentage chance to save the world tree and apparently even if you do all of it there’s still like a 1% chance you could fail still fail. I don’t know if the 1% chance to fail type thing actually made it into the game, I haven’t seen anything official on that but you can fail at saving this tree I guess is the gist of it. because the world is apparently dying, but we’ll talk more about that in the world building section for now let’s jump to character creation.
Released Date of Biomutant
The Biomutant Game was announces in 2017 and released in 25th May, 2021. Which was developed by Experiment 101 and published by THQ Nordic.
Character Creation in Biomutant
So really cool ideas here. Unfortunately, a lot of them don’t carry over their importance to the rest of the game so while you are in character creation it feels like you are making some substantial decisions but ultimately, I would say only one decision actually has a permanent repercussion. So, you pick your breed which is basically an appearance option for the most part and then you are given a little slider where you can kind of mess around with the exact look of that breed while also affecting your characters stats this is called mutating your character basically. After that you pick class which is probably the only decision that actually has genuine repercussions but even then, they are not very major, so depending on which class you pick you will get an extra set of perks to choose from in character progression which we will get into in a bit. And that’s it. Other than that, it’s the only decision that has lasting effects here because class is really just a starting setup for your character, the perks here can actually be bought later instead of a class getting a certain perk right at level one you can then if you wanted to go by another classes perks and still use them but the part tree that each class gets is unique to them, well perk list if you will not necessarily a tree, it’s unique to that class. Now that said, the appearance of the mutation part that seems like it’s going to be important but while it does affect stats in character creation, it is possible in game to find mutation pools at the power plants you can find in the world at those power plants you can actually mutate your character’s appearance without affecting your stats, which seems like jumping through an extra hoop.
World Building in Biomutant
Let’s talk about some world building, as I mentioned at the start you have to find and kill all four world leaders and solve the tribal war. So, there are six tribes you have to join one of the two that you get options for at the very beginning which is the Jagni or the Myriad tribes, and then you will help those tribes to either conquer or subdue or unite with all of the other tribes. now Jagni in the Biomutant is like the big warrior type tribes whereas Myriad is more about working together for the common good, whereas Jagni honestly don’t even care if the tree gets saved. Each tribe that you pick will affect the options that you have later so if you pick Myriad you can’t just outright kill the other tribe leaders for instance, whereas if you pick Jagni you can’t unite with them you have to subdue or kill them, keep in mind that this is entirely separate from the world leaders which you need to kill, but those are the main things going on in the open world. But before we dive into even more of that let’s back up a tiny bit, because in order to get to the open world you first have to get through the opening tutorial area and this quite frankly is just not done well I think. The intro to the Biomutant game is long, it is constantly being interrupted by freezes that explain basic game functions to you and if it just lasted until you got out of the initial starting area it wouldn’t be so bad because you get up out of the like bunker or whatever it is you were in the world opens up you see one of the world leaders destroy a village, Great, you think and okay now the game starts, I can start running around and do whatever you want but that’s actually incorrect because at this point, the world is set up in such a way that from here you cannot actually go to the rest of the world until you stop by one of the two tribes that I mentioned earlier Jagni or the Myriad you have to join one of them to sort of officially kick off the tribal war, then you have to go through one more small little dungeon area and then finally after that you will reach a place called Brick town where then you can finally go do the things you want to do several hours later for your first time to the game anyway, and it’s just It’s long, it’s tedious it’s unnecessary. I think if they had structured this in a way where you just left your initial bunker and then you could go do whatever you want it would have been fine but they added like this unnecessary like hour and a half worth of just narration and stuff.
World Leaders in Biomutant
The world leaders and the tribe war are separate but they both have to be done, the world leaders are pretty straightforward you go to a specific place on the map, help one of the characters in the game assemble a way to defeat said world leader and then there’s usually a pretty cool boss battle involving you destroying the world leader, actually those fights are really cool. And also, you get access to vehicles and stuff which are a high point of the Biomutant for me but we will get there.
Tribe War in Biomutant
Now the tribal war is interesting in Biomutant. So, the way it works initially is that you pick your side like I mentioned earlier and then you will have to first take over the opposite tribe from the one you picked, either the Jagni or the Myriad you have to go take three of their outposts and then you can go take their fort which effectively destroys that tribe or subdues or unites them. For starters taking the outposts is underwhelming. Not in a bad way, I don’t know really what I expected here I just feel like they could have done more with it but basically you walk up to an outpost there’s a small mission of sorts and then you claim that outpost, sometimes it involves just fighting off a few waves of enemies, sometimes it’s a mission where like you have to go rile up some monsters nearby then kind of drives the people in the fort out. And then once you have conquered the three outposts you go and do a much more involved mission to take over the fort that ends with you fighting that tribe’s leader and then when you are able to defeat that leader, you can get their tribe weapon. There are six of the tribe weapons of course because there are six tribes.
They are unique weapons that do unique things and they are pretty cool overall but I wouldn’t say they are anything groundbreaking. once you defeat the first tribe you are then given the second tribe to go after. Same thing here pretty much some of the missions are basically on repeat. However, I think the game realized this is going to get boring or annoying so after you are able to defeat the second tribe you are given the option to skip the rest of the tribe wars. Basically, the leader that you sided with would come up with the opinion that all the other tribes are willing to sm0ke the peace pipe. So, if you don’t want to do the rest of fighting the tribes, you don’t have to and you can just right there choose to end the tribe war. The only consequence to doing this is that you won’t get the other tribe weapons from the tribes you didn’t actually defeat but it will wrap up the rest of the tribe war and honestly given how repetitive it was unless you just really wanted to try weapons, I don’t really think there’s a reason to keep doing it after that.
Narration in Biomutant
The narrator is for me personally okay but none of the animals or breeds here speak English or anything even close to it, they all speak various languages so there’s a narrator who kind of translate what these things are saying and it makes the dialogue very slow. Moreover, in dialogue the only thing you really do is choosing lighter or dark, are you the big bad guy or are you normal? there’s not a lot in between there either which is fine but it just feels like a weirdly clunky system and the rest of this game because the game is gorgeous. I like the way it plays and everything, which again, we will get into that but this narration just feels weirdly out of place and that tutorial is just not a good start to this game.
Transportation in Biomutant
But beyond those two major things that the world is kind of set up around. There are 23 characters if you will they all give side quests some of them are actually for the main quests or the people you go find to then fight the world leaders with and then there’s 16 specifically side characters that will give you a lot of unique quests and stuff. Now I enjoy these a lot.
So, usually the quests are kind of cool but often the reward for doing them is like a vehicle or something that will then give you a new way to move around the world, there’s an airship you can get there is a another one which is basically just like a jetski and basically it just makes traveling around the world easier. I really enjoyed these I thought the rewards were unique one of them is like this furry shark but that thing was awesome, I had a lot of fun with those particular side quests.
