BioMutant. Am I the only one that thinks this looks good?

Reviews are all over the map on this one, though the most common comment seems to be that the game is like a huge, shallow lake. Just about every system imaginable is in this game and few if any of them have much consequence. Beyond that, mileage seems to vary review by review based on how much the critic cares about that, how aggravated they are by the narrator and whether they have a relatively glitch-free experience or not. The Kotaku review noting that they had upwards of one crash per hour of gameplay while playing the PS4 version on PS5 is Cyberpunk levels of miserable.

I saw the common rating is roughly 6/10 for a majority of outlets and the consensus is that the game has interesting ideas that it doesn’t quite deliver on. Seems like the small studio behind it maybe got a little too ambitious with the scope of the project.

I've really wanted this game to be good for years now but it looks like it turned out how I expected...middling.

Well it might be fine but the critics seem to not be completely happy with this one. I'll see how it turns out tomorrow when my $60 collectors edition shows up.

Kinda gutted this didn't turn out great, developers seemed to have a lot of heart

Least the name's still fun to say.

I like to compare this to ELEX. A game that reviewed extremely poorly and I love to death. There's a very fond place in my heart for weird European RPGs that get a lot of things wrong but the stuff they get right resonates so much with me. I'll know tomorrow but Biomutant seems to profile in that direction.

Part of me hoped that this could somehow surprise people, but a bigger part of me was kinda expecting the long development cycle to show up in gameplay parts that'd feel pretty dated by now. Shame, though the world still looks interesting and pretty. Maybe once it's heavily discounted...

I watched Dan stream this last night and then hopped into a random stream of it too and it looks like it might have been very ambitious with all of its systems. Disappointing to hear from the reviews that the multiple systems don't really pay off; one to wait for a discount/gamepass I suppose.

If the developer gets enough success to push ahead with a sequel, that might be when the systems can develop more depth.

Not a fan of playing as an animal.

I watched Dan's stream and it just looks boring. It has no real soul. The comic-book "klick!" pop-ups are completely out of place; nothing else looks like a comic or has that vibe. The character's feet slide on the ground as they run, making moving around feel awful; for a character-action game this is a big deal. Every movement and attack have no weight to them. I could go on and on getting into the story and voice acting and the decisions around that, but you get the idea.

I'm impressed they managed to show footage of the game that looked so good for all these years leading up to release. They fooled me.

Biomutant is good but i have some nitpicks. I don’t have any connection to any character, not even my own. As far as I can tell there are only three fully voiced characters; The Narrator and the Good and Light Auras. The Narrator is alway with you and is always, well, narrating. He basically reads all character dialogue to you. For some reason this absolutely makes it difficult to really connect with anyone I talk to. Also the combat and controls feel weightless. They hardly make use of the vibration functions. When I’m pummeling on guys that look like brick walls, it just feels like I’m slashing into thin air. I need more tactile feedback.

All that said, I’ve been enjoying my time with the game. Weightlessness aside, the combat -is- fun and creative. The crafting system is also pretty nifty. Maybe wait for it to drop to 40 or below.

Also as far as the comic book stuff, there’s an option to turn it off in the menu.

@doctortran: I think my problem with the narrator and dialogue stuff is that they play the gibberish fake animal sounds and only after that do the subtitles and narration play. It makes every single line of speech take twice as long since you’re effectively listening to it twice. If subtitles popped up immediately, at least you could read ahead and skip through quickly. I’m only a couple hours in and that’s already getting old.

I put in about 3 hours today and those first few hours just have such a weird pacing. They're giving you a lot of UI/system information during that time but then it moves on to the next thing it needs to teach you without really giving you time to actually use system it just taught you.

I think I've gotten to the point where the game will really start to open up, so we'll see. But yeah. Those opening hours just aren't that enjoyable. And as someone else pointed out, there's just no weight behind your attacks. If there weren't numbers flying off the enemies I'm attacking, I would have no idea when I was doing damage.

Oh and yeah I don't fully understand why the narrator translates instead of just having the subtitles go with the gibberish.

But I am gonna spend some more time with it, despite all of this. I still see some potential... But I'm glad it was just a part of my ea subscription.

I am also about 3 hours in, and am having fun. But I also have a list of grievances.

The pacing is strange, and it also has these gameplay-to-cutscene-to-gameplay cuts I feel you saw a lot ten to fifteen years ago. Last place I really noticed this kind of transition was watching Alex and Vinny play the first Mass Effect. It's not smooth, and it often feels like there is sound missing. That goes for the entire game so far. It is weirdly silent or muted.

The combat can become a lot of fun I think, but I too feel a lack of weight. I also fairly often attack without seeing any numbers, which means the attacks just goes through the enemy I guess. The way the lock-on system works is also kinda aggravating at times, as your character turns towards the locked on enemy even though you are trying to attack someone closer to you in a slightly different direction.

I'll also echo the narrator. I have no idea what the option of raising or lowering narrator and gibberish does in the audio settings, because I can't tell the difference. If I could either go full narrator with subtitles or full gibberish with subtitles I would. This weird hybrid that takes twice as long has caused me to skip dialog. Pressing A advances the dialog so you see the subtitles, but sometimes the gibberish is short enough for that press to skip to the next line.

If it opens up after my current task (Killing the first World Eater) then I think this can be a fun, chill exploration game with some combat here and there that might turn into something cool once I got more powers and different kinds of weapons. But if this was me a few years ago when I had next to no disposable income I would be pretty miffed.
So wait for a sale or try it on EA+ if you have that I guess.

I have played about 2 hours of the game and i thing it looks super good. It is a an open world game and may not be the most technical but it does seem interesting and I am interested to see where it goes . Right now new game releases are pretty light and I dont have that much that I am interested in coming out soon so I'll put my time into it and see what happens. Also first game for a relatively small studio of i believe around 20 people.

Another person chiming in to say they really dislike the gibberish / narration. Also, really irks me that most dialogue is from the third person point of view. Makes it hard to connect with any character, even my own.

And my god, the number of terms they throw at you in the first couple of hours.

I also have to assume some of the conversations during development must have gone like this:

"hey boss should we add collision to this?"

"nah"

"hey, should the world map actually reflect the world?"

"nope I don't see why they would"