Mutant Reviews

Mutant is an ancient game from 2007. It's a whopping 17 years old at the time of this review. The game hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on modern gaming PCs. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an ancient game. This seems to have been put on Steam as a nostalgia gouge, or just a cash grab to try profit from abandonware. Remembering that 2007 gave us Bioshock, Crysis and Portal... this compares very badly to games from that era. This was an unusual (and unsuccessful) Xbox 360 era twin (more than twin?) stick shooter type game, with a twist, you're Goro from Mortal Kombat....'s weak little nephew, but you have four arms. So you can shoot twice in one direction. Or should in two directions at the same time! It's all up to you. So there's a bit of a convoluted mechanism to point with your other arms. Novel ideas aren't always good ideas. So the game never caught on but if you are considering buying this for nostalgia reasons it does at least have 4K support and some other graphics tweaks, so that's something. The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality, very dated for a 2007 game, in some places they appear mismatched... Ultimately the quality of these assets, and thus the overall visual quality is lower than average, and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience. Remember, we're looking for the best of the best of 100,000+ games on Steam. The game is very badly optimised, despite having extremely low quality assets and visuals, poor production values and no real reason for a high workload on anyone's system, the game runs the GPU up to 100% immediately. While this may seem to be evidence of cryptomining, Valve checks for that prior to allowing a game on Steam through Steam Direct. It's more likely the developer just had no idea what they were doing and didn't do any optimisation. Regardless of the reason, if you don't want your PC getting thrashed needlessly by bad software, you might want to avoid this game. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 2 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam? Mutant is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $3 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.