THQ Nordic announced Biomutant last year, and this year they brought a fully playable demo of the upcoming action role-playing game to Gamescom.
Biomutant lets you design a cute, furry mutant rodent, and engage in battle with other furry friends. Take a look at the latest trailer before we dive right into the demo.
The Biomutant Gamescom demo starts us off with character creation. We need to pick our character’s attributes by choosing a point on a circle, which determines the combination of strength, endurance, agility, charisma, and intelligence our mutant possess.
The choice of attributes also affects the way our character looks, with a more buff appearance for a character with high strength or endurance, and a slim figure and buck teeth for a character with high agility.
The only other thing we get to customize was the fur: style, length, patterns, and color. While I hope to see even more customization options when the game finally arrives, it was enjoyable to create my furry little hero.
The demo begins when our mutated rodent gets shot down out of the sky. We soon engage in combat with our not-so-friendly company for a chance to familiarize ourselves with Biomutant’s combat.
In Biomutant, you battle using an array of weapons. In the demo, we get to use a rifle, a blade and later a rocket-powered glove. Combat is fluid and lets you quickly move from a directional dodge to a rifle shot, a blade swipe and back into a roll. Guns auto-aim at the enemy closest to the center of your camera, so you don’t have to aim carefully during hectic fights. While I’m sure you’ll be able to turn this off in the full game, it does help the flow of combat.
As the demo progresses, we battle more unique enemies, including a giant bear with multiple breakable body parts, and furry creatures with rockets strapped on their backs that launch into the air if you shoot at them with your rifle.
Combat is pretty fun, but it becomes so much better thanks to the narration in the background. The narrator never stops talking, giving the whole game a vibe like that of a furry… I mean, a fairy tale. It immediately reminded me of games Bastion.
When combat subsides, we arrived at a puddle of soap, where we learn how to make a bubble that lets us bounce over gaps and onto enemies. You can also swipe enemies off their feet and get them stuck inside a bubble, and even launch them out if you choose to blow it up. Using the bubble takes some getting used to, but once you thoroughly knew how to control it, it becomes both a fun ability for platforming and a very interesting mechanic in combat.
We make our way into the basement of a scrapyard shed and meet a furry friend who sends us to fix his exo-suit in a low-oxygen area. The world of Biomutant is a ravaged one, so low oxygen zones and other environmental hazards are not uncommon.
After fixing the exo-suit and customizing it with a funny headpiece, we get to take it for a test run. The exo-suit controls completely differently from regular gameplay. You can use the suit’s rockets to hover and fire its shotgun and homing missile to take down enemies with ease. You can also use the exo-suit to absorb puddles of toxic oil that block you from passing.
The whole area is grey and looks heavily contaminated, and after taking out more enemies and absorbing more puddles, I arrive at a boss battle, which looks like a massive crocodile of sorts. After dealing a fair amount of damage to the creature, the game shifts into a cutscene in which the boss destroys our exo-suit and swallows us whole.
But our furry hero isn’t done. We wake up inside the monster’s belly and make our way up his stomach and into a swollen organ. We attack the bulbous mass until the beast vomits us up and drops dead.
The skies become clear, and a large root of what the narrator describes as the tree of life frees itself from parasitic vines. The demo ends.
I have to admit that I was very impressed with Biomutant at Gamescom. The game is adorable and vibrant, with a streamlined combat system and unique settings.
The furry action role-playing game will release on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019.
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