That’s as per publisher THQ Nordic, who confirmed to Automaton Media that the recently released Nintendo Switch version of Biomutant is selling about 20 times higher than expected in terms of both physical and digital sales, which is a shockingly good start for the new release by any metric. As per Automaton’s report, THQ Nordic believes the Switch’s portability being a good fit for the open world action RPG has contributed to its strong sales.

Whether or not Biomutant will be able to maintain momentum in Japan remains to be seen, but it’s certainly got off to a decent start on the Switch. It should also be interesting to see what kind of a sales bump the game will have enjoyed following its Switch release in other parts of the world. Hopefully THQ Nordic will share those details in the coming weeks.

In addition to Nintendo Switch, Biomutant is also available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

The story occurs in a post-apocalyptic setting where players customize and control a mutant who must save the Tree of Life. To do that, they’ll need to defeat the five creatures assailing its roots, but some cooperation with the six tribes is paramount. The catch is that three have…differing opinions on whether they should ensure the tree’s survival. The Netra, Ankati and Myriad are different degrees of Light tribes and believe in saving the tree. Meanwhile, the Pichu, Jagni and Lotus are Dark tribes with more selfish and/or megalomaniacal views.

It’s thus up to the player which alignment they pursue, represented as Karma. It’s possible to embrace the Dark side and go on a killing spree with the other tribes (even those that are Dark-aligned) or seek a solution that involves all of them co-existing. Depending on your Karma, different dialogue options could pop up while quests change. All of that is ambitious in its own right, but Biomutant was only just getting started.

It also featured – in no specific order – character creation, vehicles (including a mech), a dynamic weather system, third-person shooting, beat ’em up combat with multiple combos (dubbed Wung-Fu), loot with various affixes, mutations, elemental damage, Automatons which provide several functions like boosting your damage or granting the ability to glide, and…the list really goes on. There’s even a narrator and the world is suitably massive. Again, not impossible for a developer but the scale and sheer number of systems raised some skepticism about the execution.

Though touted as content complete, Biomutant didn’t receive much marketing or attention over the next few years. It got bad enough that Experiment 101 even had to clarify that it was still in development. By June 2020, new details and gameplay emerged, and by January 2021, a release date of May 25th. It seemed all well and good, especially with the developer touting up to 65 hours of gameplay, depending on how the player approached it.

However, upon launch, Biomutant received overall mixed reviews. While there were higher scores and praise for its environments, combat, and customization, it attracted criticism for the lack of challenge, derivative systems that other games did better, a dull open world, multitudes of bugs, a boring story and much more. We gave it a five out of 10, praising the boss fights and “varied gameplay” but panning the systems, seesawing tone and “uninspired morality.”

It also didn’t help that the narrator was initially very talkative and downright annoying, whether in combat or translating the gibberish spoken by characters. Because when you play a post-apocalyptic sci-fi title where some tribes are about the survival of the fittest and culling the weak, you expect Banjo-Kazooie-style gibberish, but I digress.

Biomutant would have been easy enough to dismiss from the outset if it didn’t show so much promise or have such a lengthy development period behind it from such an experienced team. Nevertheless, even in the open-world design department, the world felt underwhelming with the same repetitive activities and forgettable characters.

To Experiment 101’s credit, it sought to address the game’s many issues early on. Patch 1.4 went live just a few weeks after launch and revamped the tutorial, removing dialogue and “camera presentations” for better pacing. It also mercifully toned down the narrator and even provided options to turn him when characters are talking to each other. Loot drops received some revamps, including less Common loot from higher level crates; the new Extreme difficulty promised more of a challenge; and the addition of New Game+ allowed players to select perks from all classes. That’s on top of several fixes for combat, sound effects, quests, visuals and much more while addressing crashes and other bugs.

But wait, there’s more. A few days later, it further improved things with another patch, optimizing loot drops, increasing the level cap to 100, adding a field of view type on PC, and even expanding the combat options with melee lock-on and animation canceling for some moves. Random encounters also spawned more frequently, and you could add modifiers to New Game Plus and each additional run of the same to increase the difficulty. This was on top of even more fixes for issues.

By August 2021, it was announced that Biomutant had sold one million copies. Not bad, considering the sheer scope of the game and the development team’s size. So what was next? As it turns out, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions. It received three display options from Performance Mode for 1440p/60 FPS (with Xbox Series S players getting 1080p) to Quality Unleashed for 4K and 40+ FPS on Xbox Series X and PS5. It also supported the DualSense’s adaptive triggers, haptic feedback and motion controls, and previous-gen owners could upgrade to the current-gen versions for free.

Upon launching in September 2022 for the new consoles, it once again received mixed reviews. The former stands at a promising 79 Metascore with five critical reviews, while the latter has 65 reviews for a 66 Metascore, which is unfortunately more in line with its launch reviews. Despite the many fixes and improvements, many foundational issues with the story, world design, tone, Karma system and whatnot were still flawed.

Biomutant is now available on the Nintendo Switch. I went hands-on with it, and the results are…mixed. While it’s notable that Experiment 101 brought it over with a reasonably stable frame rate (there are still dips), the overall visual quality is nothing too impressive. Combat and general movement can feel a bit rough at times, and though it’s not outright terrible, it still feels like the experience could have been something more.

You could say it’s harsh to judge a $39.99 game from a smaller team like this, but even after all these years, Biomutant’s various parts don’t coalesce into a compelling whole, bringing down the entire experience. Less than the sum of its parts, if you will. If you can get into the combat and ignore the goofier elements, it may be worth checking out on discount just to kill a few hours. Given the other options available, especially on the Nintendo Switch, it’s a tough sell.

Biomutant’s legacy remains a strange one – while not a roaring success, it wasn’t an abject flop, at least in its launch year. How well it’s performed on Xbox Series X/S and PS5 remains unknown, and whether it can find an audience on the Nintendo Switch after all this time is a toss-up. If a sequel ever does come about, hopefully, it will expand on the overall universe and present a more compelling story and better world design to leverage its many systems.

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, GamingBolt as an organization.

Biomutant on the Nintendo Switch will be playable in docked as well as handheld mode. When the Switch is docked, the game will run at 1080p with a stable framerate of 30 FPS. Handheld mode, on the other hand, will run the game at 720p at 30 FPS. Both modes will have dynamic resolution scaling.

Development of Biomutant on the Nintendo Switch has been a long process for THQ Nordic and Experiment 101. The game was originally slated to hit the hybrid platform in November 2023. Interestingly, the original planned Switch launch date of the game was set for more than 2 and a half years after its original release.

Along with the Nintendo Switch, Biomutant is also available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review of the game’s original release, where we gave it a score of 5 out of 10.

Publisher THQ Nordic has confirmed that Biomutant is finally launching for the Nintendo Switch, with Saber Interactive handling the port. The action RPG has been in the pipeline for Nintendo’s system for a while now, with THQ Nordic originally having launched a November 2023 launch for the Switch port last May, but it seems the game is finally ready for release. How well it’ll run on the hardware remains to be seen.

In our review of Biomutant, we gave it a score of 5/10, saying, “Biomutant works best on paper, but it has too many derivative elements for anything alone to stand out.” Read the full review through here.

Biomutant is currently available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

THQ Nordic has announced that Biomutant will finally be releasing for the Nintendo Switch later this year, on November 30, over two and a half years on from its original launch. Both physical and digital releases will be available. There’s no word yet on what the game’s technical specs on the platform will be, but with plenty of months left until its launch, it’s likely we’ll be learning more in that front in the future.

In our review of the game back when it first launched, we gave it a score of 5/10, saying, “Biomutant works best on paper, but it has too many derivative elements for anything alone to stand out.” You can read the full review through here. You can also read our review of the current-gen versions through here.

Biomutant is available on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

Starting December 6, subscribers of PlayStation Plus Essential, Extra, and Premium will get free access to Mass Effect: Legendary Edition, Biomutant, and the newly-announced Divine Knockout (DKO), a new platform fighter that’ll be available via the service at launch.

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition in particular is a solid offering, so subscribers who haven’t yet played BioWare’s beloved trilogy will have the chance to go it a go. Meanwhile, Divine Knockout’s Founder Edition will be on offer to subscribers, which will also include bonus content.

That, of course, means that PS Plus subscribers have until December 5 to claim November’s free games, which includes Nioh 2.

The free games reportedly include Mass Effect: Legendary Edition on PS4. For PS4/PS5 players, there’s Biomutant and Divine Knockout. These will allegedly be available for subscribers to claim for free from December 6th, 2022, to January 3rd, 2023.

Mass Effect: Legendary Edition is worth it, as the remastered trilogy of BioWare’s hit sci-fi RPG series. However, Biomutant may also warrant a look after the numerous updates and current-gen release. Again, Sony hasn’t officially confirmed if these titles will be available for free in December on PlayStation Plus Essential, so stay tuned for the announcement.

billbil-kun’s track record has been spot-on so far. They recently revealed that the Epic Games Store Christmas giveaway was reportedly returning on December 15th. Learn more about that here.

What’s worse, following the story of Biomutant is a mostly bland experience. Nothing ever really sticks out as particularly bad, and no one moment really blows you away. It’s all fairly rote and doesn’t change much from the array of decisions you make as you go through it, which, with how grandiose and ripe with possibility the setting feels, is a rather disappointing reality. Other than picking a general ideology and a tribe to favor at the beginning, most decisions in Biomutant will lead to roughly the same things. Lots of scuffles with other post-apocalyptic creatures, and the redundantly structured missions, all blur together pretty quickly and usually leave it to you to introduce your own variety into them.

"Following the story of Biomutant is a mostly bland experience."

The occasional boss fights are probably the highlights of the combat side of the game, as these giant “World Eaters” are fun to take on and pack a few surprises. The RPG and customization side of things is similar to everything else in that it constantly reminds you of it’s potential with the vast number of weapons and other items that can nudge your character into different directions, but rarely ever capitalizes on all of that with fights that largely play out the same few ways throughout the majority of the game. Especially in the first third or so of it.

The biogenetics and psi-powers do mix things up nicely with a commendable amount of variety on your end, but enemies’ attack patterns never really match you in that regard, and some visual effects from combat can obscure the enemy too much, making it impossible to anticipate their next move. Making that worse, the camera still gets caught up in surrounding shrubbery more than it should, interfering with an already impaired combat experience. With so many other great games that came out last year, Biomutant’s moment in the spotlight was short-lived, and perhaps deservedly so. It brought a lot of cool ideas to the table in terms of its design, and subsequent updates over the last year have improved some areas in notable ways, but at the end of the day Biomutant only ends up offering a few sparks of the roaring fire it could have been.

Now, with the native PS5 version in our hands it seems like the grand promise of Biomutant is a little closer to reality. The depth and lushness of the game’s world is much easier to appreciate, as running through it all at a solid frame-rate is undeniably charming most of the time. The variety of areas and characters you come across make the world feel like there’s almost something new to discover in it, despite the fact that most of those things are going to be strikingly similar to each other. The graphics of Biomutant were never really a problem, but now that these consistently well-done textures and gorgeous lighting techniques are met with equally solid performance and optimization, the game can convey its odd combination of cutesy weirdness and dystopian futurism even more convincingly.

"You can almost feel the much more substantial PS5 brute forcing its way through the limitations of the last gen version."

You can almost feel the much more substantial PS5 brute forcing its way through the limitations of the last gen version, and it even goes so far as to have three display modes; Quality mode which hits you with that 4k sharpness with a frame-rate capped at 30, performance that gets you 2k visuals at a pretty solid 60, and the far more compelling quality unlocked mode which tries—and generally succeeds—to have the best of both worlds with 4k resolution and an uncapped frame rate that seems to be at least 50 or 60 most of the time. With forced VRR turned on for my PS5 it’s even more stable, and to my eyes it looks like I could be getting more than 60 at times. The bottom line is that it rarely dips into anything low enough to notice, and that’s pretty cool for a game that just came out last year and looks as good as Biomutant does. That doesn’t fix the occasionally sloppy and often mediocre combat fundamentally, but it does smooth out the peaks and valleys of it and lets you see what it’s trying to do a little more clearly.

Attention was clearly paid to the PS5 in particular though, as I often noticed some clever implementation of the DualSense through sounds and vibrations that reflect little things like the subtle mechanical pitter patter of an old film projector, as well as some trigger resistance for shooting that makes the ho-hum combat a little more entertaining. Thanks to the performance improvements, the auto lock during combat feels a little more useful now too, yet not so much that I don’t still prefer to use the hard lock with R3 most of the time. On top of everything, a free PS5 upgrade is available with a clear, simple way to transfer your PS4 save over right from the main menu. This way, those that bought in early and perhaps shelved it because of its underwhelming state, have no reason to not give it a second chance now. That is, unless your main problem with the game was its redundant combat and bland missions. Those issues still persist of course, as this is still the same Biomutant that took some lumps for that last year.

"Now it’s an okay-to-good game that can actually realize what it’s trying to be and stand on its own two legs—for better and for worse—which is a much better look for Biomutant, as it does undeniably have some bright spots that are worth showing off."

Released in a questionable state originally, this version of Biomutant seems pretty serious about making up for that as much as it can. Aside from redesigning its core mechanics and general gameplay, this is about the most that could have been done to resuscitate Biomutant’s credibility and long-term reputation. It’s a reasonably good game that will give die-hard looters and customizers plenty to do if the game clicks with them, but overall, it’s still one of those games that insists upon its timelessness on the surface despite never really earning it. As it was, it was an okay-to-good game with bad performance, which is a bad combination, as the few things that do stand out will be hampered making the totality of the game betray its few triumphs. But now it’s an okay-to-good game that can actually realize what it’s trying to be and stand on its own two legs—for better and for worse—which is a much better look for Biomutant, as it does undeniably have some bright spots that are worth showing off.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 5.

Across all three platforms, players can benefit from HDR support and fast loading times. Xbox Series X and PS5 feature 4K and 60 FPS support in three modes – Quality (dynamic 4K at 30 FPS), Performance (dynamic 1440p at 60 FPS) and Quality Unleashing (dynamic 4K and up to 60 FPS). DualSense and Activity Cards are also supported on PS5, though how good the former is remains to be seen.

As for Xbox Series S, it goes up to 1440p and 60 FPS across its three modes. To check out the game in action separately on each platform, head here. For more details on the previous-gen version, check out our review. Despite launching with its fair share of issues, Biomutant has sold over one million units as of August 18th, 2021.

The current-gen version is out on September 6th with fast loading times and HDR supported on all three consoles. On Xbox Series X and PS5, there are three modes to choose from – Quality Mode with native 4K (at dynamic resolution) and “stable” 30 FPS, Performance Mode with native 1440p (dynamic resolution) and “stable” 60 FPS, and Quality Unleashed with native 4K (dynamic resolution) and up to 60 FPS. The last option seems to indicate that the frame rate isn’t locked at 60 FPS. The PS5 version also supports DualSense and Activity Cards.

On Xbox Series S, Quality Mode offers native 1440p (dynamic resolution) at stable 30 FPS, Performance Mode provides native 1080p (dynamic resolution) at stable 60 FPS, and Quality Unleashed with native 1440p (dynamic resolution) and up to 60 FPS. Xbox One and PS4 owners can upgrade to the Xbox Series X/S and PS5 versions for free. Save files and Achievements/Trophies also carry over.

For more details on Biomutant, check out our review here.