Biomutant

Biomutant is an action role-playing game set in an open world environment and played from a third-person perspective in which the player takes control of a mammalian warrior in a world filled with mutated animals. Players customize their character including length, body shape and thickness, fur, fangs, and many other attributes that can be tweaked and all have direct impact on the statistics of the playable character during gameplay. A thicker character is heavier, which makes it slower but conversely allows it to deal and resist more damage.

The protagonist is able to dodge to the left, right, and backward, as well as jump. The combat system combines melee attacks with long-range shooting. The player collects parts throughout the game and combines these parts to create a weapon. Each part has its own effect on the statistics of the end product.

Biomutant has branching storylines where decisions made by the player will decide how the story will continue. The main plot revolves around the "Tree of Life", which is struck by a natural disaster and becomes polluted by poisonous oil from beneath the soil. The five roots of the Tree, through which it gives life to the whole world, come under threat from five creatures who begin slowly gnawing at them, threatening to kill the Tree before it can heal itself. The situation is further complicated by six tribes, each split from their original enclave. Three of them want to heal the Tree of Life and restore the natural balance of the world, while the other three see an opportunity to expand their territory and power.

Each tribe can be influenced through the Karma system. The player can ally with a tribe and eliminate other tribes in order to grow the power of the allied tribe in the world, although the player can decide on the Tree of Life's fate without having to eliminate any of the tribes if they want to.

Biomutant is the first game by the Swedish development studio Experiment 101, which was established in 2015 by former Avalanche Studios employees. After working on the Just Cause series for many years, the founders of the studio wanted to go back to the basics of video game development and create a game that is "fun in a good way". Experiment 101 has a flat organization and had 18 employees in August 2018. Development on Biomutant started after the foundation of the studio.

On 19 August 2017, an advertisement in the German gaming magazine GamesMarkt revealed the existence of the game, dubbing it as a "post-apocalyptic kung-fu fable", before being fully announced on 21 August. The game was playable later that week at the German trade show Gamescom. In an interview which was published the day after the announcement of the game, Experiment 101's head of studio Stefan Ljungqvist said that the game already was content complete. He mentioned that one of the most difficult things for the development team was to balance the combat system in order to "combine shooting, melee [attacks], and abilities in a quite intuitive way". Unreal Engine 4 is used for the game.

Biomutant received "mixed or average reviews" according to Metacritic.

Luke Reilly of IGN awarded the game a 6/10, writing, "Biomutant has a lot of the building blocks of a top-drawer action RPG but its cookie-cutter approach to objectives and puzzles starts feeling very repetitive very early on."