 This will be a quick one, because it's not very complicated. Biomutant is not a good video game, and that sucks because I desperately wanted it to be a good video game, but it's not a good video game. In fact, it's pretty much a bad video game. Now, that's not to say there's nothing at all good about it, but it is to say there's a lot that's downright bad about it, a bunch that's incredibly boring and some that is inexplicably annoying. And when you balance that against the very few things that are good, well, it ends up being a big old ball of disappointment. Looking forward to it. In early 2020, this year looked to be a huge one for games. Then stuff happened, and people who work in offices started having to work from home, and next thing you knew, small games like Returnal were suddenly huge releases, and Biomutant somehow became a title I was really looking forward to. I will say that Biomutant is a good example about how awesome publishers are at making good trailers, because in the brief bits of gameplay we saw, Biomutant looked like a winner. The game had been through a hugely difficult development and had seen years of delays, which is usually a bad sign, but everything I heard about Biomutant made me want to love it. Developed by a tiny team, Biomutant had to look of a labor of love. Unfortunately, while Biomutant is a fairly large game from a small team, it fails to have even one thing that it does really well. Let's start with the thing that any great action game needs to get right. Combat Biomutant is a scattered game that has the player in a pretty annoying amount of dialogue, but for the most part the game is broken into four sections. Exploration, dialogue, progression, and combat. Only one of these parts ends up being good, and it's not the part that's most important in an action game. Biomutant can't decide what kind of action game it wants to be. It has long animations, a parry system, and a stamina management system, which are the things that make Souls-like games work. It also has magic abilities and combos and large amounts of enemies, which is what makes something like Devil May Cry hack and slash games work. The problem is, the game is neither of these things. Souls-like games require enemies with clear attack patterns and precise timing to make the combat feel fair and fun. Hack and slash games require a bunch of combo possibilities and tons of enemies to make up for the power of the player. Biomutant's biggest issues are the result of totally failing to figure out what makes each genre work, and instead it ends up just mashing a bunch of systems together haphazardly. Let me just list the problems here. Biomutant's combat feels weightless and lifeless. Sound design and player animations are weak. There's no active lock-on targeting, so it's finicky and annoying to hit things. Even the biggest weapons have barely any reach, add to this that enemies have annoying levels of health, and what you're left with is neither the fluidity and excitement of a hack and slash, or the careful engagements of a Souls-like. Instead, what you have is a button masher. If enemy animations aren't clear enough to let you know when they're going to attack, and you can't prevent them from attacking by locking them down, you're left with running in circles dodging, hitting an enemy once or twice until they power through your attack, and then they hit you back. The reason this is so disappointing is because it's not a mystery how to make combat work. For as much shit as I give Assassin's Creed these days for having only average combat, those games at least get the very basics of enemy design right. Enemies attack infrequently and have obvious tells. You attack until they're about to attack, and then you dodge or block and repeat. It's too simple and shallow, but it works because they at least got the basics correct. The mechanics and skills match the enemy design. Biomutant is so half-hazardly designed I have trouble understanding what happened. There's enough here to have easily made an effective system. In the best action games like Souls, The Surge, or Devil May Cry, animations and sounds do a lot to sell the combat. It's those things that take a good combat system and elevate it to pure bliss. But a game's combat can succeed without those things. Hellpoint was a Souls-like I had planned on doing a video on back in the day because it was a valiant effort that ultimately ends up being mediocre due to its bad animations and map design. But I finished that game and played a bit of NG+, because the combat still basically worked. The game knew what elements makes a Souls-like work, and they executed on those things with a tiny crowdsourced budget. Biomutant fails to realize even basic video game combat principles. Enemy attacks aren't telegraphed, but player attacks are slow. Player attacks are slow, but encounters have a dozen or more enemies at a time. There's a combo system, but there's only one or two, which means combat boils down to endlessly mashing one button over and over until things die. And enemy attacks are so difficult to pick up because they're tiny little muppets that combos are just basically random stuff you do to make it less boring. I mean, the combat, like, works, it's not broken, it's just bad. The new AC games have very average combat that makes the game feel pretty shallow. Biomutant isn't that. Biomutant has a bad combat system, so if the combat isn't fun, nearly half of your playtime is spent interacting with a system that isn't enjoyable at all. There's another game I recently played that has a combat system that isn't fun. Mass Effect. The Legendary Edition remaster cleans some things up, but it's basically still the original Mass Effect, and the game's combat is pretty bad. It's bad for a cover shooter, it's bad even for an RPG. Even when you're using the biotic powers that make up the entirety of the fun that you can get in Mass Effect's combat, it is still, by and large, pretty awful. But Mass Effect is remembered as a great game because the other pillars of the design are all good to great. Mass Effect's greatness is in its world's building, its dialogue, and its characters. Replaying it convinced me it's not quite as awesome as it's remembered to be, but it is indeed quite good. Biomutant, for some inexplicable reason, decided that not only was it going to be an action game, it was also going to be an open-world exploration game, and it was also, for some insane reason, going to be a dialogue-driven RPG. Kinda. Dialogue. Mass Effect relies heavily on super high quality voice acting, and a game like Fallout relies on tons of interesting dialogue and quests. Biomutant obviously could not afford dozens of quality voice actors, so one would think you'd just do the text. Instead, Biomutant does gibberish baby talk that then turns into text at the bottom. Even that would have been fine, although not ideal. But for some reason I can't even possibly begin to figure out the game also has a narrator. So here's how this plays out. You click on a muppet, the muppet speaks in total gibberish for 30 seconds, then you read the subtitles, then the narrator reads exactly what you just finished reading. What is the purpose of this? Now the narrator isn't like a bad voice actor, it's just totally unnecessary. I mean watch, watch this. The last part of the game is exploration and progression, and there at least Biomutant does have something to offer. Listen, the game is about muppet mutants in the ruins of the human world, and that's pretty rad. The map really is quite beautiful and the ruins are fun to find and explore. Just wondering the map is what the game does best. In fact the map is so great that it could have been the foundation for a really excellent game. The problem is, while the map is a prerequisite, it's what you do while exploring that matters most. I am as guilty as anyone of talking shit about open world collectathon stuff, but the truth is, that kind of game can absolutely work. Horizon Zero Dawn is a masterpiece, and Ghost of Tsushima does it as well as any other game. The reason those games work is because progression is exciting and ties directly back into the other systems. So exploration drives progression, which makes combat more fun, which makes exploration more fun. Plus, the combat in those games is great. Biomutant has a really cool crafting system and an impressive amount of skills to unlock through exploration. But the fact is, the combat is so poor that there's no incentive to really drive you on exploring the map other than just to look at it. The game really only has the map itself to push you forward. So even as the progression, crafting, and map are objectively very cool systems, the combat and story simply aren't worth engaging with, wrapping up. I told you this would be short. I think this is probably the shortest video ever, but there's just not that much to say. I so badly wanted to love this game. Dude, it's about fucking Muppets with superpowers roaming a post-apocalyptic world. And those Muppets are so cool. And the map really is great. When we got looks at this game over the years, it seems like it's going to be something different, but unfortunately it's not different at all. It's a collection of systems that other games do better. And it's a game with combat that simply is not good enough. And a story that is bad. And one guy reading the same fucking lines you just finished reading over and over and over, Biomutant could have worked if the map was way smaller. And all the time and love and effort that went into creating the crafting and progression and these beautiful locations was directed to more important and crucial systems. What it boils down to is this. No matter how awesome your map or how beautiful and detailed your environments or how cute your Muppets are, a game must get its combat and dialogue right. If combat and dialogue is going to be most of the game. Biomutant simply does not get those things right. In fact, it gets them catastrophically wrong. And for 60 bucks, we have to expect more from games. I wish this developer the best of luck because I really do love the Muppets and just the visual design and presentation. But this isn't a game that's worth buying. It's honestly not a game that's even worth playing on Game Pass. It's not worth your time. And that's a damn shame. Alright, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.