Finished up all of Biomutant I'm likely to play. What a weirdly obtuse and likeable game that was... It plants it's flag firmly in the b tier, but they really swing for the fences with some of the design decisions.
Combat never really feels that great until all at once your weapons are overpowered and you start getting other effects stacked in. That may be my fault though, because leveling up is a pretty free spirited decision. You can boost one of your stats, health, strength, speed, intelligence, luck, and something else. Well, the characters moved pretty slow so I went for speed early on. That caused a slower ramping up of my abilities I think. Combat in general reminds me of an old game like Freedom Fighters, where they hadn't quite worked out how it should feel. There's a loose lock on system, where you are kind of locked onto whatever is in the direction you are facing, but it's very loose. You kinda just have to flow with the combat and attack whatever gets in the way. Don't worry too much about targeting particular baddies, because you will get frustrated by all the jumping around between targets. There are some simple combos, but they never seemed especially more effective than mashing X. You can use ranged attacks during combat too, but just accept that you won't always be shooting where the camera is pointing. There is no zoom to aim down sights here.
The story is presented through flashbacks and local rumors and legends. Most of the time NPCs end conversations with a question about what kind of person you are, if they make even that much sense. I get the sense that whoever came up with these conversation ideas really loved the druggie caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland. Also, by default the game is extremely slow when presenting these conversations. You'll talk to an npc, they will mumble incomprehensible sounds, then ten seconds later a flowery British narrator will give his interpretation of what they said. It's cute for an hour or two, but by then you'll be searching for a solution, which they fortunately patched in eventually. You can turn off the mumbling part and just get the narrator to tell you what they are saying immediately. How could they have ever thought that was an acceptable design decision before? Whoever came up with that idea does not play games, guaranteed.
Parts of the game are beautiful and ambitious, but only in parts. Most of the time the swirling textures and slowdowns during rain and blurry goop image quality is hard to appreciate. Then, you ride your weirdly wobbly horse slug over the hill into the grassland and see a slice of a beautiful game again.
Despite all the bad parts of Biomutant, I enjoyed playing it. It feels a lot like a modern early PS2 game, with a lot of experimental mechanics and the kind of gameplay you do not get from games this big anymore. I recommend renting it.
