I’ll admit, the first time I played Biomutant I was in a pretty bad place. We were well in the grips of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working a factory job to make ends meet, and my home life wasn’t particularly healthy—not to mention I was spending WAY too much time on social media. As such, I think my thoughts about what was just a bad video game definitely turned kind of toxic.
But now, I’m in a much better place and while I completely stand behind my criticism of Biomutant, I had hoped that a chance to reassess it—not just from a better place mentally, but also with a renewed perspective on video games, in general—would help shine a new light on it. Unfortunately, it did not: outside of some minor adjustments, Biomutant remains the same bad game I played four years ago.

Effectively, everything I said back in 2021 remains true. This is the same basic game now on the Switch—for whatever that’s worth. However, if you missed it back then and don’t want to read the review I’ll summarize it briefly: Biomutant is set in a world that was destroyed thanks to an evil corporation which dumped so much nuclear waste into the ocean that it wiped out humanity and mutated all the wildlife. How it didn’t wipe out similar mammals will forever be a mystery.
“Effectively, everything I said back in 2021 remains true.”
Now, giant mutated monstrosities called “World Enders” are wreaking havoc and it’s up to the player to stop them, as they are the chosen mutants of destiny. It’s a solid enough narrative concept with environmentalist undertones that I actually liked even back then, and now seems even more poignant after a global pandemic and continued climate crisis.
And it’s worth noting that, at the very least, one of the major problems I had with the story, the way that it was delivered, has sort of been fixed. Initially, I hated how the game presented every dialogue encounter as characters would spout gibberish for a prolonged period, only for the narrator to dictate what was being said. While I can appreciate the attempt at worldbuilding and giving the characters a bit of personality, it just felt like a waste of time for the player to sit through gibberish being spoken at the same speed normal dialogue would have, only to then have to have it translated through the narrator—spending more time doing nothing.

And while I noted that an early patch after the initial release did introduce a slider in the options menu to turn down the rate of gibberish to narration, in my experience, it still felt like a pretty big dice roll. Thankfully, this newest version gives you the option to turn the gibberish off altogether—it also gives you the option to turn the narrator off which only mutes him during dialogue and doesn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I’ll roll with it.
However, my fundamental problem with the story is still present, namely how completely hollow it is narratively. As I said before, Biomutant has a morality system attached to its narrative, but it’s so restrictive binary as to render it pointless. Almost every narrative situation conceptually boils down to, “Do you want to free the slaves or murder them?” There’s little to no room for nuance not only in the way characters approach dialogue but in the overall narrative as well.
I explained in my previous review that the game essentially railroads you from the start whether you want to be good or evil. This is expanded by having the player “unite the tribes” of which there are six—three are some degree of good, and three are some degree of bad. While superficially “different,” the good tribes all want to unite the tribes in terms of physical togetherness and save the world, and the bad trees want unification through death and to effectively end the world.

It’s just so cartoonishly on the nose that it loses all meaning and depth. And like I said previously, “conquering” a tribe doesn’t allow for any kind of peaceful unification should you be choosing a good character. You still need to go into their base, murder anyone there and claim it for yourself. While you can try to convince the faction leader to surrender peacefully rather than engage them in combat, there are no options for diplomacy in the greater gameplay.
And in terms of Biomutant’s other gameplay hook, the combat is as unsatisfying as it was before—perhaps more so now in this reduced framerate, lower poly Switch port. Attacking is sloppy and feels somewhat uncoordinated. Locking on automatically is somewhat unpredictable, and none of the weapons feel like they have any weight behind them. Attacking still lacks any audio/visual feedback and it all just feels like a mindless button masher.
What’s worse, aiming for the guns now allows for gyro-aiming, which would have been a good inclusion if they didn’t use ROLL which makes it completely pointless when playing in handheld. It’s marginally better when playing in docked mode but since the game attempts to auto-target/lock-on to whomever your attacking, the need for accuracy is somewhat redundant.

I wasn’t big on Biomutant’s visuals before, and I can say they are tangibly worse on the Switch. I thought the game looked “very pixelated and rough” on the PS4 version, and this is definitely worse on the Switch. If Biomutant had a more cartoonish art style, it could have gotten away with it, but since it’s going for a weird, gritty realism, everything looks very poor and low-resolution. Especially the character’s fur textures that often look like a mess of pixels—which isn’t helped by all the character types just being generally ugly.
“I wasn’t big on Biomutant’s visuals before, and I can say they are tangibly worse on the Switch.”
And Biomutant’s performance isn’t particularly great on the Switch either. The aforementioned framerate reduction is compounded by noticeable chugging, there was one moment where the screen had noticeable pixel burn, and every time I booted it up it took so long to load I thought my Switch froze.
Biomutant COULD have been a really good game if it leaned into its inspirations more because there are slivers of good ideas here. If it were a linear action game that focused on flashy, tightly designed action and told a straightforward, interesting story—The Secret of NIHM by way of Devil May Cry would have been an AMAZING game—it would have really worked. I don’t know if it was chasing the “open-world RPG with crafting elements” bandwagon that it seemed every game was attempting back then, but it honestly suffered for it.

But I’m not here to review the game it could have been, I’m here to review the game; I got and four years later, Biomutant is marginally less broken than when I first played it, but it isn’t remotely less hollow. While I always think it’s a bit gauche to say the Switch version is the worst way to play a game because of obvious technical reductions, this genuinely is the worst way to play a game that wasn’t very good to begin with.
I’ve played this game twice now, and I can say without any anger or malice in my heart, as a critic who reviewed 206 games, Biomutant is just a bad game, trying way too much and succeeding at nothing, though not for a lack of trying. Why anyone would want to play this now, on a system that has The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom on it is beyond me.