Mothergamer Plays Biomutant

 Biomutant looked like an interesting game to me and appeared to hit all the right notes with me in regards to my love of open world role playing games. The premise of the story being set in a post apocalypse world centering around a tree of life that is being poisoned by creatures known as world eaters I found intriguing. The opening scene from Biomutant is beautiful and sets the scene for the adventure. The menu allows you to set up your character creation. The animal creatures look very cute and I chose one that looked like a cute red panda. This is also where you can choose the job class you want to play as. There are melee classes like Dead-Eye and a mage type class like Psi-Freak Class. I personally chose Dead Eye because I liked fighting with swords and pistols which gave a nice mix of close and ranged combat. 

My Dead-Eye character. 

Right from the start, you see how big the world of Biomutant is. The map is huge and you have to explore to unlock all the areas. There is fast travel in the game which helps a lot. I do wish that each area would tell you what level you should be because sometimes I would run into enemies that were a much higher level than me and I would have to run away. Level grinding isn't so bad because there are plenty of places to explore. There are also branching paths to the story with side quests such as tribal factions fighting each other and you can choose which faction to join and capture outposts. Combat itself is a lot of fun with special melee moves and magic powers like ice spikes. 

Having fun with the combat with moves like Wicked Wolf.

There's all kinds of gadgets you can use to get around certain areas that are too dangerous to walk through like a field rampant with oil pollution. This required a very cool giant mech which let me walk through unharmed. There's also a cool water bike that gets you through the water safely since the main character can't swim. I discovered that the hard way and died pretty quickly. All the tools add a little extra fun to the game, but the giant mech was my favorite. 

Giant mech time! 

There are also cute animal mounts that look very soft and fluffy. You can summon them at any time and it makes exploring new areas a lot faster. There's several different biomes in Biomutant with their own unique landscapes. There are a lot of beautiful vistas which shows the contrast between the polluted areas and bursts of beauty really well. There's crafting in the game as well so you can upgrade your weapons and armor. You can find materials in places you explore and you can also buy items from shops in the outposts which is convenient. There are a lot of options so you can tailor your job class build to your play style. 

Taking in a beautiful view. 

The main story is you have to fight the four world eaters that are chewing on the branches of the world tree. These are epic boss fights that require you to gather materials and parts for a vehicle or tool where you can use five small creatures to launch at the world eater to distract it and get some hits in. There's definitely a learning curve with some of the world eaters and it's not always obvious what you're supposed to do so I died a lot until I figured out the patterns. This is where Biomutant shows some things that are not so great like wild camera angles that block your view so you have to run around until the camera resets. This got really frustrating especially with the world eater fights. Other than that, the fights are fun. I just wish they had addressed the camera issues.

Fighting a world eater. 

The range of enemies, the exploration, and the combat are great. The story itself is interesting, but there are parts where the pacing feels a little tedious and repetitive. There are puzzles that are simple, but they're very much the same so I got a little tired of constantly solving them and sometimes the reward was not worth it. Biomutant isn't a bad game and I did enjoy it. However, there are things that definitely need work in regards to the pacing, the camera angles, and quest bugs and game crashes of which there were quite a few. The ending to the story itself is rather abrupt and not really satisfying. It feels like it runs out of steam which is unfortunate because Biomutant is ambitious and there's a lot of great things in it, but the flaws keep it from reaching the potential it could have had. For me it was fun to play through once, but I don't see myself going back and replaying it. It's a good one and done adventure.

Adventure done! 

*Biomutant is available to play on the following platforms: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

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