I definitely do not recommend: Biomutant (Review)

this video is brought to you by surf shark vpn i almost didn't finish biomutant after the 10 hour mark i was so so done with this game i desperately wanted to stop playing it by that point i'd explored two thirds of the map unlocked about half of the available upgrades and abilities done a whole bunch of side quests and main quests i'd gone off the beaten trail to see what secrets this gigantic map has in store in that time every hour became more difficult than the last as i searched desperately for a reason to keep going i couldn't find one and the only thing that spurred me forward was the fact that i had to review this video game having now completed the game after around 16 or 17 hours i really wish i had stopped at the 10 hour mark because nothing i experienced after that did anything to change my mind biomutant is very very not good i'm aware that this is an ambitious new ip made by a small team of around 25 people i'm always really aware of that sort of thing when reviewing games from small studios i definitely reset and realign my expectations based on the size and experience of a studio because expecting breath of the wild level quality from a startup studio of 25 people is unfair having said that the outer wilds is basically the best game i've ever played and like 20 people made that valheim is the best game i've played this year and five people made that small teams can accomplish very very big things but that is not the case here with biomutant biomutant is a cautionary tale of biting off more than you can chew it's scope creep the video game it's a laundry list of features and systems that would make an open world rpg fan salivate but very few of those systems work well and at no point do they coalesce to form a compelling immersive rpg experience had the developer drastically reigned in their scope they might have arrived at something there's some cool ideas here the world is pretty the crafting is cool the creature designs are interesting the character creation is great there's stuff here that sort of works but it doesn't work nearly well enough to carry the day because even bio mutants best components feel half baked and its worst components uh yeah they're really bad anyway i'm sorry to be the bringer of bad news but bio mutant is not good and you should not buy it [Music] fire mutant makes one hell of a first impression i'm not just talking about the flashy trailers we've been seeing it opens with a beautifully rendered cg sequence that sets the scene and gives the impression of a game bursting with quirky charm a few button presses later and we're into the character creator which is honestly really good we can select the type of rodent we are and they each come with predetermined stats we can then allocate our stats in a way that will morph our bodies which is a nice touch we can select our fur color and add a little bit of flare we can select our class which gives us access to both bonus stats and abilities all these decisions by the way aren't binding like dark souls for example your early choices are just to get you started after that you can use any weapon or item you like and unlock every ability should you choose to do so so far so good we seamlessly transition from character creation into the game world and in a few steps we're offered our first morality-based decision there is a dark and light alignment system in this game and like mass effect it's free-flowing in that you can make a good decision here and a bad decision there and your alignment will influence certain quests certain dialogue options and even allow you to unlock certain abilities that are exclusive to the light or dark alignments again all good stuff so far so good we go a little further forward and we bump into our first combat encounter one button or trigger will do a ranged attack and the other does melee there's dodgers and parries there's some combos it all looks very flashy and it really feels in that moment that the action you saw in the trailer was accurate it looked great there and now you're playing it and it looks cool here but already even at this point there's a few question marks popping up the sound is one this is what it sounds like when you hit an enemy in biomutant there's not much there but you know maybe it's just that weapon type it's a skinny weapon we'll park that for now there's also the general floatiness of combat the lack of hit registration and feedback it kind of feels like you're hitting a pillow with a feather but look it's early days probably reading into it a little bit too much let's keep going the next section is a linear tutorial mission that gets you to grips with exploration gear and puzzles it's fine but eventually we get outside and we hit the open world biomutants open world is absolutely one of the big draw cards for this game the trailer footage depicts a sprawling vibrant space full of unique characters to meet and secrets to uncover that's about half true firstly the world is gigantic it's eight square kilometers i've run around almost all of it because the game loves to send you back and forth across it for no reason at all its scale is impressive and surveying its vistas i'd be lying if i said the infinite horizons didn't give me pause it's also quite a beautiful world it's lush it's green it's rolling hills and rocky outcroppings dotted with villagers and the remains of those that came before you the central premise of biomutants world is that humans polluted the planet so badly that they self-selected out of existence leaving in their wake mutated creatures such as yourself to inherit the top spot on the food chain you will find old oil tankers and factories and train yards power lines connected to nothing and train tracks to nowhere the scale of all this does a good job of distracting you from just how barren and empty this world is but eventually the realization catches up with you and it's difficult to think of little else i don't mean baron in the gritty post-apocalyptic storytelling sense by the way i mean there is just nothing going on in this world nothing you roam around and you see like one creature sitting in a field you ride for like three minutes without bumping into an npc or a random enemy or anything you look at this world and you think it's got to be teeming with enemies to fight so you can put all that gear you've collected to good use there's just nothing out there it's probably the most empty open world i've traipsed through this is a theme i'll return to in this review but this open world feels like pre-alpha like they've built their topography and their landmarks but they haven't put the npcs or enemies into it yet it really does feel that empty you are meant to explore this world to uncover its secrets the way this works is that you'll arrive at a landmark like the remains of a town or an oil tanker and there'll usually be no enemies there at all and then a little thing pops up on the side of your screen telling you what you can loot and collect there and then you just walk around opening up boxes that have random loot in them and when all the boxes have been collected the game says area cleared and then you leave that's exploration in this game i did that loop probably 10 times at different locations and it never changed i think it has to be said that there's a big difference between the expansive skybox carried open world that you run through versus the internal spaces that you explore a disproportionate number of internal spaces were essentially drab concrete bunkers and sewers and bare ass caves with nothing going on a lot of budget went into making the outdoor spaces look great it seems very little budget went into making internal spaces look equally good puzzles there are puzzles though there's only really one type it involves rotating three nodes so that the colors line up once you've done it the first three or four times it no longer poses a challenge that doesn't stop the game from asking you to do it 15 or 20 more times and that's just in the time that i've been playing rounding out this talk about the world we should briefly touch on technical performance i played this on an rtx 2080 ti 4k max settings it ran beautifully i didn't see one frame drop i had no crashes and no bugs there were no quests that didn't complete or whatever it was technically very sound i played it mainly with the controller which worked fine but i also tested it with a mouse and keyboard which was equally comfortable the menu does offer full button remapping for both controller and keyboard and mouse so that's great there are a fair number of pc options on hand including ffv slider screen shake toggle dynamic resolution toggle and a bunch of others i have a lot of complaints about this game but the technical performance and the quality of the pc port isn't one of them do note though that i spoke to two reviewers who were playing it on a ps5 and they both commented that the number of crashes they were experiencing was absurd after i spoke to these people i learned that biomutant's native 4k option would be disabled at launch instead utilizing 1080p upscaled to 4k this change was only for the ps5 version and not for the xbox series x version of the game my unconfirmed suspicion is that it was the 4k resolution that was causing these instability issues because it's a really big deal to promise 4k and then take it away last minute especially when you do that for only one platform having said that the crash issues may still persist even after this change so if you're planning to pick this up on playstation find a review that talks about the playstation version of the game post day one patch because you don't want to be paying money for a console port that is constantly crashing to be clear i strongly recommend against pre-ordering this on any platform or even buying it on day one until you've got clear definitive reviews on console performance with the day one patch because right now there's too many question marks okay so that's the introduction the world exploration performance let's talk about the big stuff now the main quest lines the combat the rpg and the sound design my mutant is an open world post-apocalyptic kung fu fable basically in terms of structure it's like sell the breath of the wild i guess but the feedback that's you know that we've been getting over the years it's that a kind of a strange weird good mix between ratchet and clank devil may cry batman arkham yeah and a couple of other influences that was biomutants game director stefan lonqvists which i'm sure i've got the name wrong but that was his take on biomutant and what it is and you'll notice at the start that he says it's most similar to breath of the wild i think that quote is gonna come back to bite him in the ass this game is not like breath of the wild certainly for the first 10 hours this game is actually much closer to a ubisoft style game where the map is divided up into sections with a whole bunch of forts you have to assault the fort to unlock it it will give you access to some new vendors you do a few forts for each region and then you assault the main fort to take down the tribal leader rinse and repeat that a bunch of times until you have conquered the map now on top of that there are four world bosses who have to be taken down they each have a big long boring fetch quest chain before them which culminates in a really awkward and janky boss fight the game director has said that you can finish this game in 15 hours if you b-line it or if you do everything it would take you 60 hours i spent about 16 to 17 hours doing all main quest lines and some side content i really can't see how this stretches out to 60 hours but i have absolutely no interest in trying to find out the ubisoft-esque map marker driven assault the fort style gameplay felt like side content enough forget this right this is crazy the map you see i have conquered i've only actually conquered half of this what happens after you've taken down the first three territories is that you get an offer of surrender from the remaining three tribes they just offer to give you their territory so you don't have to clear all the forts when this was offered to me i thought it was a joke so i accepted it and then boom the map was conquered and i didn't have to do anything the game offered me a way of skipping literally hours worth of one of its central mechanics the conquering territory thing i've never seen a game do this it's almost like the developers knew that this was really boring and exhausting so they wanted to give the player an out yes thank god they did though because it was it was not good i mean you walk over to a fort you bang on the door you fight an enemy and then you've captured the fort uh when you capture it you can explore it you realize that there's only a handful of forts and they're all basically copy and pasted across the map every single detail within these forts is identical from one to the next down to the placement of lootable chests and npcs even for a game with this sort of structure it feels a little flagrant it's not just the thoughts that are repetitive though it's the quest steps to open them on three occasions i was ready to assault a fort and i go somewhere and then the npc's like all right we're gonna fire you in a catapult but you need a helmet first so go get one and i'm like all right never mind that i'm currently wearing a helmet and i have a whole bunch of other helmets in my bag but okay there's a map markup a few thousand meters away so i go over there i kill some dudes i loot an item i go back to my bros and this cutscene rolls sound on there is some variance in this fort clearing thing one time i had to go into a cave and kill some enemies another time i had to disable some turrets that were being used as defenses and it was funny because i thought that when i had disabled the turrets then i would begin the assault but no when i disabled the turret uh immediately it skipped to this cut scene where i had conquered the fort by the way when you do conquer the fort the dialogue options are always the same for the faction leaders and npcs it's it's just it's the same the world boss battle i did was really janky and not good that's a lot to do with how bad combat is in this game but we'll we'll come back to that there are side quests in biomutant definitely like a ubisoft game by mutant is filled with a massive collection of collect-a-thon side quests that send you to all corners of the map to essentially just take up time and pad things out there's one side quest where there's about 23 captives spread across the map and you have to go to the marker kill the dudes you break them out of the cage and then there's a dialogue sequence and it's always the exact same dialogue by the way and you can choose to either help this person or for some reason you can do this bam the dark wins again right right that's again the actual sound uh i don't know why you'd want to punch someone after you've just freed them but okay you do you little rodent dude there are lots of side quests similar to this collect the 10 boat pieces find the 15 billboards clear the 10 bandit camps do the five puzzles at the place that are just rotating the colors all of that stuff there are some more interesting side quests sort of but even they fall flat for example i found this big conch horn thing and it turns out it summons a big underwater fish guy i look around i find the quest that lets me use these horns i follow the markers i blow the horns do that two more times and on the third time this happens that's the end of the quest the story for this quest is that we need to kill this big fish thing but we didn't he just sort of popped up out of the water and then bailed likening this game to breath of the wild is a really bad idea for a lot of reasons not least of all is the fact that it's just not remotely close to that experience it it shares nothing with breath of the wild other than that there's a glider and they both have a lot of grass and look maybe you don't know me and you're thinking well this dude obviously just hates this sort of rpg open world thing last year ghost of tsushima was pretty much my game of the year horizon zero dawn pc was on my game of the year list as was immortal phoenix rising which i actually loved and i solemnly awarded the game of the generation award to the underrated masterpiece man-eater so i am down for this formula i really am biomutant is just is not a good version of it in that earlier quote from the developer he also likened biomutant to devil may cry and batman arkham i'm going to assume that he's referring to the melee slash rain slash aerial knock-up style gameplay of devil may cry and they're you're constantly encircled by your foes in counter design of batman arkham this is a hard section to write because you're looking at this combat and you're probably thinking that looks pretty cool that looks fun this is why the game has done so well with its trailers because combat really does look nice it's just not nice to play to its credit combat gives you a lot of toys to play with there's at least five types of melee weapon which each have their own animations and combos there's at least four types of range weapon that also have their own unique feel there's abilities like fire dash and teleport and ground slam and a whole bunch of others there's a lot here to play with but like the rest of the game it all just feels half baked none of it works well and you can't help but think why didn't you just cut half of this out and focus on making two or three things work well rather than making 12 things that don't the overall feel of combat is the worst part there's just no feedback whatsoever when you hit something the poor collision detection the way enemy animations just don't respond the total lack of satisfying sound effects batter them down all these things are the fundamentals of combat when these are missing it doesn't matter how many abilities or aerial knock-up combos you have the fundamentals just out there there's also just some bad design decisions for example there's one ability that you can use to make enemies attack each other and doing so covers them in a green cloud when that happens they will still attack you as well but now you can't see their attacks in their telegraphs because they're obscured by green cloud that's not the only visual clarity issue camera is really bad there's no lock on toggle in the game meaning that you can't lock your camera to a specific target the game will auto lock onto something and you can change that lock on with the right thumbstick that thumbstick is also used to control your camera so you essentially have to choose between focusing a target and controlling your camera it's very bad and i don't know why they did this i think they were going for that arkham style combat where the direction you're facing will determine who you attack but that only works in arkham because the camera is pulled right back so you can see everything the camera here doesn't do that so this whole thing just falls apart one part of biomute that i actually quite liked was the weapon crafting so there are about i said five types of melee weapons like one-handers two-handed swords big crushing weapons etc and there are at least four types of ranged weapons pistols shotguns auto rifles and marksman rifles as you go through the game you'll collect individual weapon components that you can combine to create unique weapons now most of these components and combinations are just cosmetic and stat based so your weapon looks funky and it might have stronger stats than a different combination but it's not like you've magically created a new type of hybrid sword mallet thing no it's cosmetic but it's nice some of the pieces though do have a kind of modifier on them like this piece that will drop exploding pellets at the feet of whatever i'm shooting of all the components in this game i think this modular cosmetic plus stats plus modifiers crafting system is the only real keeper this is the one thing that i'm like yes i hope this gets carried forward in other games but even that is not enough to save combat or even exploration since 90 of exploration is just looting these individual components most of which downgrade so they get broken down into scrap there are so many of these components that it becomes laborious to have to constantly loot them and disassemble them the crafting system is good the economy that feeds it and the combat that utilizes its outputs are not okay two things to wrap up firstly let's close the sound design discussion that we've been sort of dancing around throughout this review uh return all i recently reviewed it it had probably the second best sound design of any game i've ever played after hunt showdown i'm loathed to say this because i've already hammered this game pretty hard but biomutant has possibly the worst sound of any game i've ever reviewed combat sounds we've already spoken about those cutscenes though i've given you a few examples already but there are just so many sounds missing from cut scenes the overall audio mix is bad like this is what the game sounds like when you're riding through the open world [Music] you can hear the sound of the beating hooves isn't quite right it's too quiet and i know that sounds like a really nitpicky example but the whole game suffers from this issue where the volume of various sounds just hasn't properly been balanced there's this thing on youtube or any recorded medium really you can have the best picture quality the best editing the best written script whatever if your sound quality is asked then it's all over audiences need sound that doesn't suck it's hard to think about anything else i've mentioned before that this game feels pre-alpha the sound is the clearest example of that and since good sound is so integral to an experience like this it just has a devastating effect on the whole package finally let's come back to that last comparison the developer made ratchet and clank i think he's probably referring to the character designs the world the personality that we think of when we recall ration and clank i think of all the disappointments i had with this game the complete absence of personality was the biggest one you really get the vibe that this was going to be a world full of fun characters to meet but here's the thing there's no voice acting in this game other than the narrator every character you meet will make some random sounds and then the narrator will essentially translate what they have said like this we've been warned about the state of the tree hopefully it's not too late not only does this get really annoying really fast but it also means that no one you meet has a personality with a tone of voice and an accent and funny turns of phrase they're all just character models that blurt out random sounds and then the narrator will homogenize what they've said into this singular voice that exists across every moment of the game it completely sucks the life out of this world this is a real critical hit against this game because if they managed to get this part right i might have been able to push through the rest of it like if you had a cool quirky cast of characters all mixed up in a crazy story i might have just grit my teeth and push through it but with a world as empty as this i needed the few npc interactions i had to really mean something sort of to be something to look forward to and they absolutely never were there was a specific moment for me after the 10 hour mark and it was the moment that i really really wanted to stop playing biomutant it came after i'd wrapped up the factional conquest main quest line and i began to set out on what i hoped was a new exciting chapter the quest sent me to the top of the map which is far away i'd never been there before but that was kind of good because i was like hey cool new chapter new area let's go so i get there and i learn that in order to progress i need an item that item was back in the old part of the map so i fast travel there and when i get there it says to get that item i first need to get another item so i'm kind of pissed off at this point but i'm like whatever let's just keep going it sends me to an npc who can give me the item i need so long as i erect some climbing pegs so that he can climb walls to do this i just walk over to the wall behind him and i press the forward button and i climb the wall and it takes like two seconds and it's done right that's the first one the next one is a few thousand meters away so i have to run all this distance so i can just press forward against a wall to climb up it and that's the next one done then another map marker appears a few thousand meters away and i was like you know what no i don't want to do this anymore there are so many other games i could be playing right now good games that i am struggling to make time for biomutant constantly feels like it is purposefully trying to waste your time and having finished it now i can say that it absolutely achieved its objective if you value your time i do not recommend you play biomutant do you ever get those notifications on your phone that are like hey someone's trying to reset your password well i do and it's probably because i haven't been careful enough with my online data in 2020 it's kind of like we can't really be lazy without data anymore our online presence is a huge part of our lives you wouldn't leave your house unlocked you wouldn't leave your car unlocked that's why you shouldn't leave your internet unlocked either surfsharkvpn's technology encrypts your data protecting you from identity thefts and hacks but if the security angle doesn't hook you it also lets you access geo-blocked 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Channel: Skill Up

Views: 912,391

Keywords: skill up, skill, up, gameplay, games, guide, biomutant release date, biomutant ps4, biomutant xbox one, biomutant news, biomutant character customization, biomutant classes, biomutant combat, biomutant crafting, biomutant mutations, biomutant mercenary class, biomutant pc requirements, biomutant gameplay trailer, biomutant character creation, biomutant open world, biomutant review, biomutant impressions, biomutant metacritic, biomutant xbox series x, biomutant ps5

Id: JwMmTtgLMBI

Length: 26min 20sec (1580 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021