Introduction

Biomutant is a fantasy open-world action adventure where you control a sentient animal-like character working to free the Tree of Life that breathes life into the world from dark forces which have taken over its roots. The story isn't linear and can branch out in many ways. The world is filled with mutated animals, some from friendly factions, others not. As a mutant, you can modify not just your weapons, but also physical abilities, through body mods. These include robotic limbs, wings, claws, and more.

The branching story-lines mechanic is particularly interesting, where completing missions for one faction unravels more of the world and plot-lines related to them. The story is mostly narrated, but fades away as you progress and are able to figure things out for yourself. Much of the gameplay is third-person action, using melee and projectile weapons. The world of Biomutant may not be a visual masterpiece as it is a little too cartoonish at times, but studio Experiment 101 tried to introduce many new elements to the action-RPG genre that are better experienced than explained.



Biomutant is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and offers decent graphics with a bright-colored cartoonish art style. The game only needs DirectX 11 and is designed to be moderately taxing on today's gaming PCs. In this article, we take a closer look at both the gameplay and performance of the game across our suite of graphics cards.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the highest setting, with fur and draw distance at max, too. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The game supports "windowed," "fullscreen," and "borderless."
• Non-16:9 resolutions are supported for gameplay, cutscenes are letterboxes—you can see that in my screenshots.
• There are no artificial FPS limits, and V-Sync can be disabled completely.
• The amount of sharpening defaults to 20 and looks good without being too distracting
• "Dynamic Resolution" tries to achieve a certain FPS target and automatically adjusts the resolution scale accordingly
• "Resolution Scale" is your typical upscaling option. The setting ranges from 25% to 100%. Only the game's rendered 3D graphics will be affected, the HUD and texts will always be rendered at the native resolution.
• You may choose between the following quality presets: "Low," "Medium," "High," and "Max." Interestingly, "Max" is not really the maximum; the settings in "Advanced" are not affected by the preset setting, no idea why.
• The "Advanced" section has two more options, which we maximized, too.
• Field of view can be adjusted on a separate settings page, up to 110° from the default of 75°. I found 90° to be a better choice than the default.
• Motion blur is always present and can't be turned off via the settings options
• To change these settings, open "GameUserSettings.ini" in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Biomutant\Saved\Config\WindowsNoEditor\" and add a section:
  [SystemSettings]
  r.MotionBlurQuality=0