Biomutant Xbox Series S/X Review

Biomutant’s story centers around the Tree of Life afflicted by a natural disaster and becomes polluted by poisonous oil from beneath the soil. Its roots are being gnawed at them by five creatures thus stopping the tree from healing itself. Things are only amplified by six tribes: three of them wanting to save the tree and the other three seeing this as a chance to expand their territory and power. It’s up to the player to either save or doom the tree by making various decisions by interacting with the leader of each tribe.

Biomutant is an open world action RPG where players will explore a post-apocalyptic map, conquering areas and engaging in fluid, simple yet slightly complex combat. In between combat and conversations, you’ll also be called upon to clear a few minor puzzles for a bit of gameplay variety. One of the thing this game has in common as the juggernaut known as The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is that if you see an area, you can go there, although at your own risk given there’s nothing worst than being stuck in an overpowered area.

To survive combat, our little fury protagonist can dodge, shoot, punch or slash his way through of waves of enemies. Combat does feel a bit wobbly, but you’ll get a grasp of it rather quickly. It also doesn’t hurt to look at your equipment/inventory when coming nose to nose with new enemies to make sure you’re properly equipped.

One of the game’s best mechanics is its surprisingly addictive crafting mechanic. You can craft all sorts of weapons and every time you’ll pick up new materials/crafting items, you’ll always want to look into your inventory and figure out if you can craft new and more powerful gear. As with any RPG, your character can also evolve and upgrade their attributes: Agility, Charisma, Intellect, Luck, Strength and Vitality.

When customizing your character you can also choose their breed, or race if you will, from one of six available: Dumbon, Fip, Hyla, Murgel, Primal or Rex. Each race has their strengths and weaknesses. For example, while Rex increases Health, it will decrease Critical chances whereas Murgel will decrease Energy Regen but increase your barter and looting rewards. On top of that, you can set a class (Commando, Deadeye, Psi-Freak, Saboteur or Sentinel) each with their own positives and negatives and a resistance (Biohazard, Cold, Heat or Radioactivity).

The current-gen version of this game looks amazing. It was surprisingly beautiful on last-gen platforms but the development team managed to surpass themselves with this version. The environments are bright, lush and highly colorful. This is the type of game that Photo mode was made for. The character models are properly detailed and the customization of the protagonist can be create some wild results. The voiceover narration, provided by David Shaw Parker, is solid although hearing a Shakespeare like voice describe obscenities such as referring piss as yellow juice or morality lectures is quite uncharacteristic. While M. Parker delivers the narration, characters speak in an annoying unintelligible gibberish.

One of the issues is the auto-save/checkpoint system. While it is implemented well and will help you avoid constant backtracking, sometimes it will be your biggest detriment because you’ll respawn at the absolute worst place possible; one such example is that at one point I need to traverse over a poisoned/toxic lake where falling in would cause your health to drain faster than saying Cheese. But when I respawned, it was right in the middle of it. So I had to load my last save, which was about 25 minutes before reaching this specific spot; thus losing progress.

While not perfect, Biomutant is a great addition to the action RPG genre. The depth of the character creation is impressive, there’s a vast world to explore and the combat, albeit a bit “loosy-goosy” is fun and addictive. If you make frequent saves to counteract the problematic autosave feature that can leave you in dire situations and overlook the repetitive quests, Biomutant is one of the better action RPG experiences of the last 5 years.