[GameSpot] - Biomutant Guide: Essential Beginner's Tips

[343iBot]

Biomutant is a weird game, and while it takes inspiration from many other open-world action-RPGs, its peculiar world and unique spin on time-honored genre mechanics make it a very odd but wonderful beast. After spending a dozen hours with the game, we've put together some tips to give your weird, mutant rat/cat thing the best start in life.

For more about how the game stacks up, be sure to read our Biomutant review. Otherwise, read on for all the essential tips you need to know before playing the game.

Diversify Your Loadout

One of Biomutant's greatest strengths as an action-RPG is the diversity of weapons and abilities available, but ensuring you take advantage of everything the game has to offer takes some time adjusting to. Quite early in your adventure, you'll start unlocking different melee and ranged types, from single-handed blades, two-handed weapons, crushing hammers, pistols, shotguns, and automatic rifles--each coming with their own special melee-centric Wung Fu abilities.

Don't hesitate to switch out your weapons constantly.

With so much you can use in your arsenal, the best way to start flowing through combat is to switch between your various weapons when the situation calls for it. Heavy-hitting weapons are suitable for keeping the smaller guys stunned, and faster slashes from your smaller weapons work well against the bigger baddies as you slide between their legs to get to their blind spots. On the other hand, shotguns naturally work well against massed groups of mobs. Single-shot battle rifles are ideal when you come across flying enemies or deadlier foes that are best fought from a distance.

Having this many tools at your disposal also means you can mess around with elemental effects and equipment perks, allowing you always to have the right tools for the job that can work around any elemental weaknesses and resistances.

When we first started playing, we tried to lean into the style of our starter class, but doing so had us plateauing our combat abilities early. When we crafted a more expansive arsenal, fights became much more fluid and open-ended, so be sure to keep your tool belt stacked with the best bits you can.

Make Multiple Outfits

The world in Biomutant is messed up, but that doesn't mean you can avoid going to the gross and uncomfortable spots on the map. From biomes filled with poison, radiation, or devoid of oxygen, sooner or later, you're going to have to traverse some of the harsher landscapes in the game.

We found the game's outfit system to be beneficial here. It's not something the game highlights early on, but you can build many different outfits on the outset and save them for future use. As long as all the bits and pieces remain in your inventory, you can swap to them with just a few button presses.

Clothing plays a huge part in helping you survive the harsher elements of the world.

Clothing is especially beneficial in Biomutant because they provide bonuses beyond armor and energy regain. Many of them will also give you resistances to specific elemental effects--a system that may be familiar to you if you played much of Breath of the Wild.

You might not fully nullify any negative effects in many cases, but boy does it help when you're stuck without precious air in the dead zone where your oxygen constantly decreases. With the right piece of clothing, your oxygen loss will be much slower than it would be wearing equipment without any resistances or bonuses.

Later in the game, you'll be able to unlock some more specific bits of kit to protect you against these areas better, but in a game where exploring is so very important, keeping your wardrobe primed with clothes that will allow you to through the harshest of areas and to the best loot is extremely helpful as you get started.

Craft, Craft, Craft

If you distill Biomutant down to some of its base themes, it's a game about recycling. While this element sets the game apart, it can also be easy to forget that the only way to build your arsenal in this weird world is to make them yourself.

Generally, in action-RPGs, it's the norm that you find plenty of weapons just lying around, but in Biomutant, weapons found in the world are scarce, so you'll have to get crafty to come up with the necessary gear to survive. Scrap and parts are everywhere, so if it's not nailed down, be sure to pick it up, and if you pick it up, either use it in a build or disassemble it for even more sweet, sweet scrap.

Spend time crafting your own special weapons.

There is so much of it, honestly. In games like this, we constantly fall into the trap of hoarding all our resources and relying on random drops to get us through, always thinking, "Ahh, I'll use that later," but Biomutant really wants you to use each and everything you pick up.

So please, reduce, re-use, recycle, and all that.

Honestly, throwing some weird pieces of metal and plastic together managed to produce some of the best weapons in our playthrough. A decent can full of radioactive beans stuck on a vacuum cleaner can very well become a deadly weapon in the right paws, so make sure you're always looking to craft.

Switch It Up For Specials

Biomutant often encourages you to use everything at your disposal. While we covered that in the crafting section above, the same principle applies to combat moves and the weapons/abilities in your arsenal.

Make a habit of switching up your specials to maximize your combat effectiveness.

The best way to build up your Wung Fu abilities in combat is to switch up your specials. Each ranged and melee weapon have their own unique attack, and with a bit of practice, you can learn to flow them together with such grace that you'll be jumping into slow motion and throwing out hefty blows in the air with ease. And it's so much easier to activate if you use all of the different styles and attacks instead of one singular combo. This strategy will also serve you well for keeping you out of harm's way.

For example, you can chain your normal light and heavy attacks into a dodging ranged attack, which can then flow into a ranged special that puts you back in melee range, which is just where you want to be before you go into Wung Fu Slow-Mo.

It is a tricky ballet to get right and may be easier if you're a Devil May Cry pro, but once all these moves start to click, you'll slowly go from getting knocked around something silly to being the baddest cat on the battlefield.

Explore Everywhere

The Biomutant map is quite expansive and densely packed with things to do, see and loot. On your travels, you'll find burned-out cars, collapsed buildings, overgrown churches, and oil-sodden warehouses. Loot them all. High and low. Every bag, piece of tech, or crate. Everything is worth exploring.

Make it a point to go off the beaten path. You never know what loot you might find.

Like we mentioned earlier, scrap is valuable for building and upgrading your gear, but the only way to get enough to keep you going long term is to go out there and dig it up. While loot is easy to come by, the loot you need may not be. There are many different attachments, add-ons, bits, and bobs, so exploring every nook and cranny for usable resources is essential for stacking the odds in your favor and ensuring your weapons remain powerful. You can undoubtedly rely on the tech you scavenge as you follow the main story, but in our experience, the weirdest and most wonderful parts of our junk collection came from going off the beaten path.

Much of the special junk you get will find have small quests associated with them to bump your experience gain further, helping you unlock more weird mutations. The game is also kind enough to keep track of when you've looted all the hot spots in a location, so there's no excuse not to get out there and fill your pockets.

Give Your Green Buddy The Glider

As you explore this trash-filled wasteland, you'll no doubt notice the little robotic green bug that hangs out on your shoulder. At the start of the game, it works as a glorified torch with artificial intelligence, but as you explore the world, you'll come across memory mirages. These are represented by an adorable torch-wielding fella who hangs out around the world at nighttime. If you talk to them, you'll have a flashback to your childhood, which in turn unlocks a memory and upgrade to your little automaton.

The glider is a godsend for exploration, so make sure you nab the upgrade for it early.

You've got a few upgrade options available to you, but we recommend that you unlock the glider first. This world is big, and as you progress through the early parts of the game, having that extra mobility will help you to no end, as well as allowing you to strike from above, jumping guns first from the sky, or simply helping you avoid deadly rivers and oil spills. It's an immediately valuable upgrade and will stay as such through your entire playthrough, so it should be your first port of call when it comes to upgrades.

Don't Ignore The Luck Stat

In many action-RPG games, the luck stat is usually one that's pretty ignored, often considered the dump stat, and first to be harvested for points to put in other attributes. But in Biomutant, it's much more useful than it may first appear. Luck directly ties into your loot chances, meaning the higher the luck, the more plentiful and powerful the loot you find becomes.

Luck will help you secure rare higher-quality loot.

A few percentage points for an upgrade may not seem like much, but if you extrapolate that across looting dozens if not hundreds of chests and bags between each level up, then those few points soon start to pay for themselves. By no means should luck be your primary stat, but don't ignore it entirely either. Once you start finding the really rare and unusual pieces of weaponry and firepower, you'll be glad for just those few points into luck, trust us.

View the full article