Biomutant Live Review, Part One - Narration With A Side Of Fallout

I’m viewing Biomutant, but I’m doing things a little differently. Check out what that means here.

The first thing you hear when booting up Biomutant is the narrator. It’s a perfectly fine voice. Quite good voice work.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll get sick of it extremely quickly.

It’s understandable in the beginning. Between tutorials and lore dumps, it makes sense that you’re getting a lot in a short space of time. But there’s several problems Biomutant exacerbates with this.

First, when speaking to other characters, they talk in gibberish, which is then translated by the narrator. It stretches dialogue out excessively. Three or four lines take way too long to get through - and on top of that, it’s all in interpretive language. It’s the type of thing that would be interesting in small areas when talking to characters that your protagonist doesn’t understand, but it’s every. single. line.

On top of that, ol’ blabbermouth comments on everything. It gives context, sure, but it’s massively over-saturated.

In my particular case, it doesn’t help that the humour is… kind of childish. There were definitely some genuinely funny lines, but mileage is going to vary pretty severely depending on if you’re into that type of thing or not.

It’s like the game is scared that you won’t be able to figure anything out on your own - that you have to be spoon fed every single little detail.

This translates to the HUD as well. It’s pretty good for the most part, but there’s one glaring issue. Your mission objective is on screen all the time. As far as I can tell, you can’t just deselect missions either. Sure, have it pop up when it’s needed, but have it fade off into the background or something. Taking screenshots outside photo mode sucks because of this.

So as you can probably tell, I had a pretty visceral reaction in the beginning. But, here’s the thing. There are ways around these issues, for the most part.

I spent a decent amount of time playing around with the plethora of settings available. I wasn’t able to completely get rid of the obnoxious HUD elements unfortunately, but you are able to scale them to a size you are comfortable with - for me, it was the tiniest I could make them. This works in reverse if you have trouble parsing the info on your TV - jack it up to fill half the screen if you need to.

This works similarly for the subtitles. I go back and forth on whether to have them on depending on the game. Not only can you change the text colour and background, but there’s also several size options here as well. It’s fantastic that the game accommodates this.

Finally, the all important one. Alongside the usual sliders for volumes of music, sound effects etc, there’s a slider for… wait for it… the narrator.

I played with it a little, going with 100%, 49%, 10%. Finally, 0%. Off. Gone. No more narration at all. With subtitles also off (you still get the text in conversations, but that’s it) all of a sudden, there was peace. I can’t understate how much relief I felt here.

sorry mate. Your vaguely British voice is nice and all, but I need my freedom.

This is how I am going to play through Biomutant. I know I’ll miss so much context, but I think I prefer it that way. The post apocalyptic world can speak for itself.

I did this just as I made my way into a small town. I rummaged through trash cans, found some nifty gadgets in a fridge, dug a hat out of a toilet. There was a sereneness to my exploration. Exactly what I was looking for from this open world, mutation filled RPG.

Let me discover things on my own. Come to my own conclusions. Make my own devastating mistakes, if need be. That’s the role playing experience.

You may have noticed I haven’t talked about the actual playing of the game yet. Top level, it’s decent so far. And familiar.

Melee and ranged attacks. Combos. Dodge and parry. Gear. Upgrades. Skills. Crafting. I’m playing the “Sharpshooter” class, so a big heavy sword and a small pistol has been it so far. The sword feels sufficiently weighty, the guns a little extra help to bring some health down.

One baffling design choice however is the lock on system. Or, lack of it. There’s this vague, “target the thing on your screen” type situation, but in a game where mobility around enemies is pretty key, having to manually re-orient the camera already kind of sucks. Why there isn’t just the tried and true Zelda-style Z-targeting built in, I really don’t know. Ocarina of Time came out in what, ‘97? (Wait, that was twenty four years ago?)

Overall I think I’m going to reserve diving deep into these systems for when I’m further in. After scrounging up a bunch of gear in the town I mentioned above, I can already feel the hooks of a good creating system clawing in, and I know I’m going to want to get into the nitty gritty of it. Watch this space.

I was a little worried, in the beginning. That this wasn’t going to be the RPG I so hoped it would be. But after a bit of menu fiddling and finally getting out into some open space, I’m super jazzed. I have what I think is a mech(!) to build. At this point, I can’t wait to see more.