Biomutant Nintendo Switch review

When I reviewed Biomutant on PC almost exactly three years ago, I found myself mostly carried through it by two main elements: its gorgeous appearance and its vast open world full of secrets and loot and hidden treasures. It’s a game I played through to the end and then never really thought about again, until now. But reviewing it on now, I find that Biomutant on Nintendo Switch has lost one of those crucial elements that kept me coming back. Because on Nintendo Switch its a flat and ugly mess.

Obviously this is not really down to the game or its dev team. Experiment 101 did a decent job creating a huge, colourful, charming world. But the Switch just cannot do it justice. The textures are non-existent, the colours are washed out, the frame rate is just… weird. What Biomutant always lacked was a sense of weight to its combat, and that’s compounded here by everything just looking drab.

The story plonks your nameless character on a path to avenge the murder of a parent and ultimately either save or damn a post-post-apocalyptic world by refreshing or destroying the Tree of Life. This is the final choice, but the road leading to it is varied and winding. You’ll come across half a dozen tribes who you can choose to side with or conquer, and meet numerous NPCs with their own agendas and requests.

Your character is a mutant of rodent origin, a kind of nondescript but certainly stoat or rabbit-like abomination whose species is now dominant over a world that has long since waved goodbye to the last human being. It begins with you selecting your attributes via a slightly ungainly system that all but prevents you being both Agile and Charismatic, or Strong and Intelligent, as you need to move around a circular selection ring like choosing a colour hue.

Once this is done you select your starting class which further boosts specific stats. There were originally five but now there’s a sixth, Mercenary. These dictate your starting gear but can be totally abandoned at a certain point as you’ll earn more than enough skill points to become whatever you want, and there’s so much loot to either find or craft that this doesn’t really matter either.

As you make your way through the vibrant (well, as vibrant as this version can manage) world, you’ll find remnants of long-dead civilisations. Ruins house a number of different mini-game puzzles, hidden caches, and gear to scavenge. Optional world bosses offer challenge and rewards, but they’re all named like characters from In the Night Garden and as such are barely pronounceable and pretty forgettable.

Like Breath of the Wild, the world is divided into separate biomes with their own enemies, weather patterns and hazards. There’s the usual starting meadows, as well as frozen tundra, rainforest, and burning desert to get through. Traversing them requires the acquisition of special biosuits, the search for which makes up a chunk of the story missions. You need the suits to survive the biomes long enough to help an NPC craft you something to take on one of the four enormous bosses that you’ll need to defeat to save the world. There’s even a glider, if the influence of Breath of the Wild wasn’t obvious enough already.

A large variety of mounts helps you get around, along with the aforementioned glider and a decent fast travel system (activated by peeing on points of interest). Walking anywhere in Biomutant on Nintendo Switch will almost certainly lead to some form of combat. You’re equipped with both a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, which you can either find or craft, and then modify with a selection of add-ons. Armour is similarly upgraded, and by the latter half of the game you’ll likely be way overpowered for most of what Normal difficulty can muster to stand against you.

Combat was always an issue for me in Biomutant. While it’s flashy and fast-paced, nothing you or your enemies do has any impact to it. You never feel like you’re doing damage, which is probably apt as you’re essentially a large hamster with a samurai sword. But all the slow-motion acrobatics and John Woo bullet-dives can’t make up for the fact that the combat just isn’t quite enough fun. It’s even worse on Switch, too, as the motion blur and muddied visuals make everything look murky.

Biomutant isn’t what I’d call a fantastic game, but it is a charming and easily likeable experience nonetheless. It loses a good deal of its visual appeal on Nintendo Switch, but if you never played it on the other platforms or the Switch is your weapon of choice, it’s still worth a look because it packs in so much content, and there’s an element of thinking it’s pretty remarkable it runs on Switch at all. There’s a lot to do and a lot to overcome, and if you can get past the appearance, there’s still a decent open world game in here worth spending time with.