Gameplay

Biomutant promises to be a post-apocalyptic action RPG similar to Fallout, but with some Horizon Zero Dawn mixed in. Add some Fable frosting and sprinkle some Zelda on top and you have a winner? Not so fast. Humans have long died out, caused by nuclear waste that was produced by the Toxanol corporation. Toxanol made the world dependent on nuclear energy, but had no plan of how to deal with the waste. So when they decided to dump it into the environment, mutations started—wildlife adopted and grew stronger, while humans perished. Over time, rat-like creatures evolved to walk the planet, formed tribal societies, and soon started to clean up the human's mess, with limited success, of course. Now the Tree of Life is dying, and you have to figure out what's happening and how to stop it, or not.

Biomutant comes with the "choices matter" concept. Besides the nifty character creation that lets you customize your rodent freely, you're immediately faced with a choice: Do I support tribe A or tribe B? While tribe A wants the Tree of Life to die so life can start from a clean slate, giving evolution a chance to do its job through survival of the fittest, Tribe B wants to save the Tree and all life on Earth so it can continue to flourish.

Depending on which tribe you join, you get missions to conquer particular areas owned by other tribes. Each of those is presented as a mini-dungeon, some with boss fights. Besides this story arc, there are others, often progressing at the same time, which gives Biomutant a very non-linear feel. At any time in the story, there's also plenty of opportunities for free exploration. Just run into any direction and you'll soon find something of interest. Be it an old nuclear power plant, some human city remains, or an old railroad yard. All of these come with things to discover, enemies to fight, and of course loot! Just like in Skyrim, I wondered what's hidden here and there, and had tons of fun exploring the map. Fast travel has one of the best implementations I've ever experienced—this should be mandatory in every game. The world does feel empty at times, and maybe a little bit too big, just for the sake of having a big map.

While there is no loot spam like in Borderlands, it's still sufficiently diverse and enough to keep you wanting to improve your character. Mechanics of rarity similar to other RPGs are present, and each item has a handful stats, enchantments, and magic properties. You'll also find parts for crafting new gear, or components that can be attached to item slots. I found the crafting system refreshingly entertaining, with a lot of quality-of-life improvements. For example, you can freely add and remove components without losing anything. The grind for materials is minimal, almost non-existent.

Character development options are decent; there's some skill-tree-like choices, and another set of unlockables makes you more resistant to various forms of environmental effects. For example, radiation resistance lets you explore those nuclear power plants, with the good stuff usually found deep inside the structure. The most important unlocks are "Wung-Fu" fighting techniques, which really enhance your battle prowess. There's several weapon classes, and they all have unique fight styles you can freely switch between.

Combat is a bit clunky and difficult to master. In the first few hours, you'll mostly be mashing buttons, trying to invoke the various combos (not Mortal Kombat-like, more like Devil May Cry). Even though the game tells you what to press, you'll be lost because it's all a bit much. You have to juggle ranged and melee weapons, magic abilities, and attack combos. While you'd usually expect your abilities to be bound to the number keys 1–9, you instead have to hold the middle mouse button and press E, Alt, Space, or Right-Mouse to activate one of four abilities. Yes, really, who came up with that? The number keys 1–4 let you open a quick select wheel to pick consumables, ranged weapons, melee weapons, and summon your mount. The keybinds can be customized, though, or you'll get used to them after a while. Combat in Biomutant definitely has a learning curve because it relies on you invoking special Wung-Fu techniques to dish out some serious damage. You can also chain certain combos, and combat patterns, like "light attack," "stun," "heavy attack"—useful, just like in any other game.

While I hated the combat at first, and felt like my attacks weren't making much difference, it suddenly clicked for me after a couple of hours and became much more enjoyable and precise. Something similar happened with the storyline. As you start the game, you're bombarded with the background story and new characters. What I found especially distracting is that a lot of funky names are thrown at you, which eventually turn out to be completely forgettable because they are only relevant for one quest or so. You don't know that, though. What makes things worse is that every creature speaks its own language you don't understand, so a narrator translates everything for you. This narrator is the studio's approach to keeping production cost down, but it really didn't turn out well. The guy is extremely annoying; I honestly rather have lines of text I can read myself. You can at least use the space bar to skip through the dialogue and read the subtitles—you have to press once to skip the gibberish speak, and a second time for the subtitle/narrator.

Overall, I feel like Biomutant has been getting a lot of bad PR from both professional reviewers and gamers, many of whom only played for an hour or two. I am enjoying the game even though I had a rough start. The most appealing aspect for me is the exploration, which has me captivated more than most other recent games. The "one more quest/region" vibe is also strong with Biomutant. On the other hand, for its AAA asking price of $60, you can definitely get better games with much better production value. For most gamers, I'd say wait for a discount, and if you're heavily into action RPGs, are starved for new fodder, and aren't worried about the learning curve, you might even go for Biomutant at full price.

PC Port / Tech / Graphics / Performance

Just like Days Gone, which we looked at two weeks ago, Biomutant uses Unreal Engine 4 with DirectX 11 only. For a game in 2021, it's a shame that DirectX 12 isn't supported, especially when using Unreal Engine, where DX12 support is VERY easy to activate; it's basically a few clicks. Experiment 101, the game studio, is relatively small, so I do understand why they aren't able to devote as many resources to development and Q&A, especially on the PC platform, which no longer is everybody's darling. Games are developed for consoles first because that's where the money is, and you do notice that in Biomutant. The controls, UI, and prompts are definitely optimized for a controller; mouse and keyboard support feels a bit like a 2nd-class citizen. Don't get me wrong, the game is perfectly playable with the mouse and keyboard, but I wish the control scheme would have been a little bit better thought out.

The graphics quality of Biomutant can be divided into two categories. What looks mighty impressive are the vast landscapes, with their nicely animated vegetation and popping colors. Other world geometry, like buildings and objects left behind by the humans, were created with relatively low polygon counts and do look a little bit dated, even though they serve their purpose just fine. Your character and other NPCs are richly detailed and use crisp textures.

Even at the highest draw-distance setting, there's a little bit of pop-in as you travel through the world—typical for Unreal Engine. What looks really amazing is the lighting quality. While many Unreal games use tons of baked lighting, everything in Biomutant seems much more dynamic, and almost feels like some raytracing magic. No, there is no support for raytracing or DLSS, and I don't think any of that is planned, either.

There's plenty of settings to adjust the visual quality to your hardware capabilities. What's lacking is a way to turn off motion blur, but it can be done through .ini file editing, as described on the settings page. The default field-of-view isn't terrible, but 75° was a little bit too narrow for me, so I set it to 90°—a FOV slider is available in the settings. There is no hidden FPS caps, and the game has good support for aspect ratios other than 16:9, only cutscenes are letterboxed.

Graphics hardware requirements are demanding but not problematic. For example, for 1080p at 60 FPS, a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti has you covered, or the Radeon RX 5600 XT—definitely not unreasonable. On the other hand, some people are used to the RX 580 and GTX 1060 giving them perfect Full HD framerates—those times are over. 1440p at 60 FPS is in reach for cards faster than the GTX 1080 Ti, RTX 2070, and Radeon RX 6700 XT. For fluid 4K gaming, you'll need a Radeon RX 6900 XT or RTX 3080—this is definitely challenging. VRAM requirements are laughable; even at 4K, only around 4 GB of memory are used.

Especially AMD is hurting in Biomutant since Unreal Engine really isn't optimized that well for AMD hardware, and the use of DirectX 11 makes things worse. While we usually see the RX 6900 XT closely trailing the RTX 3090, it's not even matching the RTX 3080 in Biomutant. The RX 6700 XT is usually comparable to the RTX 2080 Ti, but falls behind the RTX 2080.