Biomutant is a game that asks you to explore and get lost in its world while the soothing navigator tells you your story amidst bloody battles with hoards of foes.
It plays a lot like a more charming Devil May Cry game based around small furry creatures that look a lot like Rocket Raccoon from Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy series. You have a sword, a big-ass gun, and tons of abilities and weapons at your disposal.
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Returning to Gamescom after its debut last year, The OP had a chance to sit down with Biomutant and see just what all the fuss is about.
The character creation is key
When you boot up a game of Biomutant, you’ll be tasked with building your character with what appears to be a very simple creation tool.
Sliders, colors, and more of the usual offerings litter the list to help create a character of your liking. One major difference, however, is how your character’s height, weight, and general appearance is adjusted.
Your character will change and morph depending on the stats you give it. If you make your character focus on strength, for example, he’ll be very small and bulky, essentially becoming a rock. Charisma, however, will see him become tall and skinny, maybe to wow the ladies in the future.
It’s a nice touch and is something that provides a bit of variety to the creation experience. We spent hours nitpicking with the statistics to see what odd shapes the mutant creature would become.
Mutate to victory
In Biomutant, you constantly feel like you’re evolving as you explore. Your little furry friend interacts with the world around him, finding new weapons, power ups, and forms of transport to help him on his quest.
These changes aren’t just simple item pickups, however—they constantly change and mutate the appearance of the character in some way to make him look different than before. When you get a powerful glove weapon, for example, that glove stays on your hand as soon as you pick it up.
You also gain access to a mucus ball ability that puts you into a hamster ball. Rolling over enemies sticks them to the ball and you can explode it at any time. When you unlock this ability, your character sometimes appears to drip with mucus.
These features give you a sense of progression and make you feel like you’re naturally growing stronger on your quest. It’s a nice touch and helps to differentiate characters from one other.
Changing things up
There’s a wealth of different combat options to choose from that really change up the Biomutant experience.
You have your typical run-and-gun fighting alongside mech combat, which lets you ride a pilotable mech in inhabitable areas. The environment also affects how you fight, with warm areas reducing your speed and stamina, making you slower, while toxic areas reduce your oxygen, forcing you to move fast or risk dying.
In one instance, we thought we beat the main end boss of the demo level only for it to throw us into the air and swallow our character whole. We thought this meant we failed the demo, but it turns out you actually spawn inside it and need to kill it from within to finally defeat it.
These moments keep you on your toes and turn what would usually be “Game Over” cutscenes into expansions over the standard hack-and-slash combat. You have to solve puzzles to get out of situations or else you’ll meet your demise.
If Biomutant continues to offer more than what we’ve already seen, it could be one of the biggest games of the year. It has a lot of potential for some big and crazy things, so fans hope they’ll get to hear more about the game as soon as possible.
Biomutant is set to be released in 2019 for Xbox One, PS4, and PC.
