Title: Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC
Cost: $34.99
Rating: Mature for language, violence
Score: 8 out of 10
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is an enjoyable, witty, turn-based strategy role-playing game with beautifully designed environments and high quality voice acting.
Much like the main characters — which are part-human, part-animal mutants — Mutant Year Zero is a clever hybrid of other successful games in the genre.
The storyline is pretty streamlined. From the opening scenes, the two main characters are Bormin and Dux — a hybrid pig and duck — who are scavengers that live in humanity's last bastion, The Ark. They've been entrusted with a mission to enter the ghoul-infested Zone (basically everywhere that isn't the Ark) to track down the Ark's top engineer, who vanished during a quest to find a mythical utopian city called Eden.
Along the way, they'll pick up some companions, gain new, powerful mutations, unravel mysteries of this destroyed world and find out if Eden really exists.
As characters take out enemies, they'll level-up and earn points that can be put into a skill tree, offering various combat mutations or increased health and ability to deal damage. As an example, Dux can gain Moth Wings, giving him access to flight that allows him to take the high ground against enemies, while Bormin can gain a Hog Rush ability that lets him stun enemies and destroy their cover.
The game's emphasis on role-playing is no accident. It's based on a Swedish pen-and-paper game, and Mutant Year Zero's roots go back to a 1980s tabletop game inspired by Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons. With those worlds in mind, Mutant Year Zero characters also find hidden treasure chests containing better weapons and armor, and they find salvage to create add-ons and customized items.
The term that serves as shorthand for this genre is "XCOM," based on its most successful and popular franchise.
Mutant Year Zero does draw some inspiration from other sources though, as it's not a strictly turn-based game. Outside of actual combat, the game employs a real-time stealth mode, allowing players to move their three-man squad under the cover of darkness, exploring areas, salvaging resources and setting up ambushes against enemies that are more numerous and stronger. The winning ticket in Mutant Year Zero is not to go in guns blazing against a superior opponent, but instead to skirt the perimeter of enemy hordes, picking off stragglers one by one with silenced weapons and squad tactics before moving in for the kill.
As with XCOM, it uses a high/low cover-based system, requiring players to flank, gain the high ground and use the environment to their advantage.
Another game to draw comparisons with is Mario + Rabbids for the Nintendo Switch. While the XCOM franchise is the gold standard, other games sometimes go XCOM-lite. With XCOM, the odds of hitting enemies in cover can be anywhere from zilch to 100 percent. In Mario + Rabbids, that hit chance is pretty simplistic — either 0 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent. Mutant Year Zero takes a middle-road approach — hit chances are 0 percent, 25 percent, 50 percent, 75 percent or 100 percent.
This puts a lot of variance in any combat situations where you don't have a clear line of sight to the enemy, which increases the difficulty quite a bit through simple randomness.
With its linear storyline, the game's replayability is limited to its increasingly harder difficulty levels, complete with an Ironman mode where a character's death is permanent and being able to reload earlier saves isn't allowed.
Unlike a game like XCOM, which offers a similar hardcore mode with a roster of dozens of soldiers to choose from, Mutant Year Zero has a maximum of five playable characters, which doesn't leave a lot of margin for error.
That said, the game is still pretty tough even on its lowest difficulty setting, so I like that it offers players a real challenge.
For not coming from a major studio, Mutant Year Zero delivers a lot of bang for the buck. While it doesn't offer hundreds of hours of content as do AAA-class blockbusters, it's a concise, moderately priced gem that offers 20 to 30 hours of playtime. As a grown man with grownup responsibilities, it's nice to also see games that know when to end (and don't drag me into staying up until 4 a.m. for nights on end). It also means that this is a good candidate to buy or rent.
I'm hopeful that this game will be successful and lead to expansions and sequels, although nothing is planned as yet.
Style on 12/17/2018