https://www.cybersport.ru/games/articles/obzor-biomutant-otkrytyi-mir-v-kotoryi-ne-khochetsya-vozvrashatsya

Clarke’s third law

In the XX century, unusual rituals became widespread on the islands of Melanesia. The natives made headphones from coconut halves, muttered something inarticulate into rectangular stones, built control towers out of wood, and even assembled full-scale airplanes – of course, without engines and prospects of one day ascending into the sky.

The purpose of this action, at first glance, is extremely pragmatic – the aborigines were simply begging for cargoes with humanitarian aid. However, the very nature of such services is deeply religious: the natives perceived the parcels from the West precisely as mystical gifts – the grace created by the spirits of their ancestors, which cunning white people stole using magic stones (walkie-talkies) and flying cars.

The phenomenon was called “cargo cult”: from cargo – “cargo” and cult – “damn cultists are calling Cthulhu again.” Its manifestations can be found even now, if you go on a trip to the islands of the Pacific Ocean. However, you can also encounter a cargo cult here – like any decent term, over time it acquired a figurative meaning.

Today, this can be used to characterize any activity of a person who blindly copies the actions of another, not fully understanding what is behind them. For example, a kind of Topson cult could be observed after The International 2019 in Dota 2: many low-rated players began to collect atypical Diffusal Blade on Gyrocopter and Radiance on Monkey King, even when the situation was not at all favorable. In Biomutant, there is a cult of the open world – following the seemingly long-trodden paths for the genre, the developers along the way have collected a complete collection of standard flaws. And together, these problems completely overlap the merits that, of course, the creation of Experiment 101 has.

Samurai in search of a target

The conceptually open world of Biomutant is not devoid of charm. The events of the game take place in an unusual setting of both post-apocalypse and pre-apocalypse: once the light had already “ended” when the mining, oil refining and playing corporation “Toxanol” accidentally destroyed human civilization and itself together with it, poisoning the earth with toxic waste. Since then, the planet has been reborn, and on the ruins of our cities there have been settlements of mutants living in harmony with nature. But as if the first end of the world was not enough, now the universe is preparing for a new catastrophe: at the base of the Tree of Life, feeding this brave new world, poisonous oil appeared, and its roots, by which the tree is connected to all regions, began to devour monsters who had come from nowhere – the world eaters.

The player will have to survive in such difficult conditions in the role of an anthropomorphic raccoon (it was in them that man evolved). The main character, as it should be in fairy tales, is the chosen one, although it is not very clear by whom and when. It is on him that the fate of this world depends: to choke or let in the world eaters, thus allowing humanity (or, rather, raccoon people) to be reborn. In essence, any outcome here means rebirth: in one case – according to the principle of natural selection (let the tree die and see who can survive in the new world), in the other – rather according to the principle of humanism (save the tree and support the weak in order to continue living together ). Making this choice is the main task of the player in Biomutant.

On this rather trivial basis, two more plot layers are strung. The first is the hero’s self-knowledge and his encounter with the ghosts of the past. Long ago, the creepy hunter Lupus-Lupine, right in front of the protagonist, killed his parents and ravaged his native village, sparing only the hero himself. Since then, the years have passed that the chosen one spent in exile, trying to forget about what happened. However, Lupus-Lupine still roams these lands, and fate itself dictates that you face him.

The second layer is the war of local tribes, in which you, as the chosen one, must put an end to it. To do this, you have to choose one of six peoples who see the future of the world in different ways, and help them win the war – either by destroying their neighbors, or by making peace with them. It sounds pretty interesting, but in fact this is the most mediocre part of the game, since it is implemented in Biomutant in much the same way as the capture of areas in San Andreas.

All six tribes look very different: some wear samurai armor, others wear American football helmets, and still others wear balaclavas and military uniforms. However, appearance is the only difference between peoples from each other. In battles, they behave the same way and do not require adapting a combat strategy for them, and their hubs meet the player with the same animation, in which only the models of the guards change – respectively, from samurai to warriors or football players. At such moments, more than ever, the lack of the budget of the game begins to be felt. The capture of each of the tribes looks like a series of primitive battles, which you can arrange every three minutes in the open world without any war.

Raccoons and genetic engineering

Explore the Biomutant universe as a raccoon of arbitrary ugliness – the appearance of the hero will change depending on what characteristics you prefer at the stage of its creation. The developers got especially hard from the players, who usually choose vitality or intelligence as the main parameter: they will have to go through Biomutant with small but disproportionately big-headed characters. Turning them into fluffy versions of John Rambo, however, does not interfere in any way – it is enough to choose the Commando class.

Flexible character customization with room for subsequent mutations in the pre-release videos seemed to be one of the most striking features of Biomutant, but in fact, players may be disappointed already at this stage. In fact, the choice of class affects only the starting clock: after that “Psi-Purity” will be able to forget about magic and take a machine gun (or even worse), and “Saboteur” – to discard a pair of Raphael’s turtle sais and arm themselves with a two-handed saw. All unique class perks can be unlocked during the game, and the fashionable class outfit will have to be changed after the very first chest – Biomutant gives out loot very generously.

With the pumping of characteristics, the situation is even more prosaic: neither dexterity nor charisma is simply needed in the game (both the running speed and the prices of goods are a pleasant bonus that does not affect the gameplay at all), and vitality with force can be ignored, since both damage and and the character will receive effective HP with equipment upgrades. That leaves intellect for wizards and luck – for those who still want to inflict real damage through crits.

However, the opportunities for pumping do not end there, since Biomutant still has unlockable wung fu techniques (no, this is not a typo) and psi abilities. With the first, everything is extremely simple: for each type of weapon there are six to seven techniques. Basic ones – for example, three weak hits – are available immediately, but more complex combos must be unlocked for special points. Difficulty here, however, is a relative concept: to perform such strikes, instead of “square, square, square” you just have to press “square, square, triangle”.

With psi abilities, things are more interesting – they are really different. For special points obtained with a set of levels (that’s right, for a level-up you get three different currencies for pumping), you can unlock the ability to hover above the ground, shock enemies, cause a snowstorm right in the middle of a fight, or even … grow mushrooms. You can jump on the latter like on a trampoline – and God knows, I tried my best to find a worthy use for this, but, unfortunately, in vain.

It’s time to return to the thesis about the blind imitation of Biomutant by other open-worlds, and in this case, rather by other RPGs. In the classic representatives of the genre, pumping is needed, among other things, to guide the player in a natural way: if the skeletons in a new cave “one-shot” you on the forehead, then it is likely that you rushed into it – it’s time to look for other locations where opponents will match you in level. As a bonus, this also allows players in the second half of the campaign to get perverse pleasure, visiting the starting areas and destroying local low-level mobs with just a stern look.

In Biomutant, however, autoleveling works in the best traditions of TES IV: Oblivion – a frankly lazy game designer’s tool. With him, the mobs in the game grow in level simultaneously with the main character, and therefore in any location and at any stage of the passage you will meet enemies, the battle with which will be of the “correct” difficulty. On the one hand, the solution is understandable: such a mechanic allows developers not to worry about the player “pumping” and getting bored when the gameplay stops throwing him interesting challenges. On the other hand, it makes the very set of experience in Biomutant simply useless: in theory, the game can be run in a straight line with a hero of the first level. The entire environment will adjust to its characteristics, and as a result, even the formidable world-eaters will turn out to be ordinary bark beetles with ridiculous damage indicators.

Hence the problems with all the variability of pumping: no matter how effective your new techniques are, with them you will not feel that you have become stronger. God be with them, with mushrooms – even the call of huge stone columns from the ground, stunning opponents, in the end remained a toy for my raccoon for a couple of battles. Hitting enemies with physical damage in Biomutant is easier and more effective. And if there is no difference, then why sweat more?

Chain reaction

All the same autoleveling on the domino principle breaks many other Biomutant mechanics, or at least makes their existence frankly meaningless. For example, the game has a traditional attribute of any post-apocalypse – a crafting system, with the help of which you can collect weapons and armor upgrades from ordinary garbage (for example, instead of a handle one of my swords had a dried banana). The classic loot system is tied to it, which overwhelms the player with various components and details for creative searches at the workbench.

The “legendary” blade can be found even under the toilet lid in an abandoned house, which seems to be pushing the player to meticulously study all available locations. However, with autoleveling, these mechanics look like the fifth wheel added to Biomutant “to be” – due to its own limitations, the game is technically unable to offer a challenge in which you would need to redefine weapon attributes. In the final battle of the experiment, for the sake of it, I assembled a wunderwaffe (and in fact – a sword from a rusty saw) from the rarest components that I got during the game. I must admit that the “cannon” burned very nicely, but the outgoing damage per second remained practically unchanged for me.

Following the crafting system, the exploration of the open world begins to suffer due to the wonderful balance of the game. In fact, your mutant will have another journey: from Koegdevino to Bricktown, from there – to Zhizhepole through Gladipelago … and do not forget to drop by Mertvozona to fight the Elephant Sniper there! However, perhaps the most valuable reward you will receive for exploring these locations is the original language discoveries of the localizers. Purely in visual terms, the local archipelago simply has nothing to surprise the player with (here it is very clear that the developers were previously engaged in Just Cause), and the more applied rewards in the form of potential loot pretty much lose value as soon as you cross the equator of the plot and finally become convinced of the meaninglessness of local crafting …

I’m not afraid of someone who studies 10,000 different strokes …

All these nuances could easily be hidden behind the fun gameplay. After all, if Biomutant was fun to fight, the developers would not have to invent new ways to motivate the player to explore the world. For example, Borderlands works according to this principle, in which all locations are, in fact, exactly the same empty arenas with mobs, where the player does not even hope to find anything but boxes of ammo and loot. And it works because shooting the asses of the murapauks in Borderlands is fun.

But punching raccoons in the face in Biomutant is not. This is due to the blatant clumsiness of the gameplay mechanics: in the game, which the creators themselves called “kung fu fairy tale”, surprisingly little attention is paid directly to the martial art. The question is not only in the scarcity of the arsenal of techniques – it is partially compensated by the presence of psi-abilities and a relatively wide range of weapons. The problems are even more fundamental: Biomutant lacks the sense of impact in combat – that very recoil.

In practice, this means that sometimes the enemies simply do not react to the blows that the protagonist inflicts on them – and as if nothing had happened, they themselves continue to beat him, and in another situation, having experienced the same set of techniques, they may suddenly find themselves in stanlock. This completely deprives the battle of depth: the player cannot hone his skills and predict the result of his actions, instead he is forced to hit the buttons and hope that everything goes according to plan.

Don’t confuse this mechanic with Poise in Dark Souls. Yes, there are enemies in the game FromSoftware that do not respond to hits, but there it happens when you cannot deal enough damage to “break through” the enemy’s balance indicator. At Biomutant, you play the lottery most often.

There are also distortions in the opposite direction: the movsets of some weapons are openly broken. So, the notorious “square, square, triangle” with a staff in his hands allows the hero to quickly inflict a sweeping blow on enemies that will stun them. So fast that the combo can be easily repeated while the opponent has not yet recovered from the first stun. The scheme even works on bosses: I won two in a row with an endless chain of such blows with a stick – my opponents never got up.

The parry system is also not very stable. Technically, it is very simple: the player must press the left bumper on the controller at the moment when the enemy strikes, and thus protect from damage. To make the process easier, the developers even added overhead hit indicators. It would seem that you see white blots on the forehead of someone else’s raccoon – press L1, PROFIT! But that was not the case: in a crowd of enemies (most situations in the game), the hero sometimes arbitrarily decides to focus on the wrong opponent, thereby making your clicks on the bumper useless – parrying will not work, but the damage from the enemy will fly in full. You will not be able to protect yourself from this, you just have to rely on luck.

Unexpectedly, but ranged weapons, which in games of the genre often serve only as a tool for extending combos, are devoid of such problems. And although at first playing with a firearm feels strange – as if Dante in Devil May Cry suddenly decided to cleanse the world of demons with the help of Ebony and Ivory alone – in fact, this style of passage, perhaps, has a right to exist. Плюсов хватает: урон от пистолетов, винтовок и бластеров не зависит от прокачки параметров персонажа, а любой уворот с зажатым спусковым крючком в Biomutant приводит к активации уморительно неуместного слоу-мо. Но есть и очевидный недостаток — это до ужаса скучно. В игре нет возможности раскачать винтовку до такой степени, чтобы сносить врагов парой выстрелов, а потому любая битва все равно растягивается на несколько крайне однообразных минут, на протяжении которых вам предстоит без конца прыгать вокруг врагов, поливая их — учитывая количество выстрелов — уже даже не дождем, а водопадом из свинца.

Сказка о нашем будущем

Довольно плачевное положение Biomutant отчасти спасает интересное решение Experiment 101 с нарративной механикой. В игре есть закадровый голос, который озвучивает абсолютно все сюжетные события и диалоги («переводя» на наш язык местную тарабарщину), да и в перерывах между экшеном не стесняется заполнять паузы ни с чем толком не связанными, но очаровательно афористичными высказываниями. Это изрядно скрашивает путешествие по откровенно пустынному миру, который без рассказчика был бы совсем унылым.

После техногенной катастрофы, которая стерла с лица земли человеческую цивилизацию, природа в Biomutant стала потихоньку отвоевывать свое. Так некогда обжитая людьми группа островов превратилась в зеленый, благоухающий райский уголок, в котором лишь редкие руины городов да обвитые лианами автострады напоминают о том, что некогда здесь обитал кто-то кроме енотов с нездоровой страстью к боевым искусствам.

Учитывая намеренно трешовый сеттинг Biomutant, удивительно, что посещение в ней таких мемориалов человеческой культуре способно с головой окунуть игрока в лиричное настроение. Столкнувшись с молчанием в трубке уже давно не работающего телефона, вы нет-нет да получите от рассказчика: «Техника минувших дней все еще с нами, хотя сказать ей нам уже нечего». А, например, на входе в руины делового центра можно услышать: «Приятно ли здесь было жить? Нет, приятно тут не было никогда. Когда-то это место было новым, но ведь новый не значит приятный. К тому же новизна быстро проходит».

Диалоги еще более стилистически выдержаны. Персонажи в Biomutant не отличаются глубиной проработки, фактически каждого из них характеризует какая-то одна конкретная черта: ученый-энтузиаст думает только о сумасшедших изобретениях, торговец фонарями — о силе света, что направляет каждого из нас, а суровый парикмахер, соответственно, сравнивает все жизненные процессы со стрижкой. И все реплики этих героев написаны с учетом их примитивных, но по-своему милых взглядов на жизнь. Моим же любимым знакомцем стал герой со звучным и говорящим именем Бульк, который на протяжении всего сюжета обитает возле барной стойки.

Местами реплики очевидно наивны. «Он был бы твердо счастлив от этой жидкости» — игра слов натянута, как пресловутая птица на глобус. Однако такое упорство в стилизации диалогов все равно подкупает, в том числе и благодаря языку, который использует озвучивающий реплики диктор.

Слизесерф на гребне волны

Отдельно здесь хочется похвалить наших локализаторов, которые, взявшись за, на первый взгляд, совсем не сюжетно-ориентированную игру, столкнулись с очень нетривиальной задачей. Рассказчик в Biomutant использует постапокалиптический новояз собственного изобретения, в котором добрая половина терминов заменяется несуществующими словами, созданными либо звукоподражанием, либо совмещением основ — эдакая заумь Кручёных на минималках.

Так, микроволновка в Biomutant превратилась в жарь-грелку, поезда — в не слишком изобретательные чу-чухи, резиновые уточки — в кряклы, а катапульта — в швырь-люльку. За счет такого необычного словообразования игра действительно создает на удивление правдоподобное ощущение иного мира, в котором жизнь идет своим чередом по новым, непонятным нам правилам. Впрочем, вся эта магия регулярно рушится — выдерживать тон локализации не всегда удается.

Резонно будет возразить, что комплимент здесь нужно делать не локализаторам, а сценаристам игры, однако, на мой взгляд, англоязычной версии Biomutant недостает аналогичного шарма. Настолько, что я впервые в жизни сознательно переключился в игре обратно на русский, закончив тестировать оригинал.

Пусть и не все, но отдельные находки «Буки» действительно оказались изящнее, чем решения англоязычных коллег. Чего только стоит адаптация откровенно скучного имени Out-of-Date как «Ужескис» (с ударением на и) — в русской версии сразу становится ясно, что герой уже далеко не боец. А Out-of-Date — так можно было сказать и про Чака Норриса во вторых «Неудержимых», но вражеский танк в фильме это не спасло.

При этом по ходу сюжета игрок осваивается в этом странном мире, и новояз постепенно утрачивает свой шарм. В первые часы Biomutant я искренне возмущался во время буквально каждого диалога: «Неужели разработчики правда думают, что я запомню весь этот бред?». Но к концу прохождения кряклы и чу-чухи уже стали для меня обыденностью, да и совсем новые слова перестали удивлять — механика местного словообразования плотно въелась в мое сознание. В какой-то мере это даже красиво: получается, я просто освоился, вместе с героем прошел весь путь и наконец-то стал своим в этом мире. Но вот причин однажды вернуться в него после просмотра титров так и не смог придумать.