Developer: The Bearded Ladies
Publisher: Funcom
Rrp: £29.99 (Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic)
Released: 4th December 2018
Available on: Gog.com, Humblebundle, Steam and Epic
Played Using: Mouse and Keyboard
Approximate game length: 20 Hours
The world ain’t what it was. Least, that’s what the elder says. In the time before, before the bombs, before the plague, before the melted caps… the Ancients stood tall. Proud of their world of steel and glass. They were like gods. But those times are gone. And now here we are a couple of mutants picking for scrap among mud and metal marvels that we’ll never understand.
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a tactical squad based adventure game that is based on a tabletop role-playing game from Sweden bearing the same name (that being Mutant Year Zero). The game is set in the remnants of a world that had been bathed in nuclear fire hundreds of years before. In that time the world has recovered somewhat, with lush foliage reclaiming most of the world. At the start your team consists of Dux and Bormin, who are a very large bipedal, smart mouthed water fowl and a tough talking, rough and tumble walking boar man. More are added to your team as you play, but you can only have three active in the squad at a time.
The members of your squad are known as ‘Stalkers’, which is a term I’ve heard a lot of European countries, Russia and its surrounding nations use. I believe the term originates from a book called ‘The Roadside Picnic’… not a particularly relevant fact to this review but I thought it interesting.
The game uses real time exploration of its maps while having turn based squad combat similar to that of XCOM. However, unlike XCOM this game isn’t mission based. Instead there is the world of ‘The Zone’ to explore that consists of multiple small maps that can be traversed through. Throughout the game you will likely find yourself needing to return to your home base known as ‘The Ark’ in order to modify your weapons and gain special perks. Thankfully there’s a fast travel system so you don’t have to manually travel through areas you’ve been to before, unless you really want to.
While you wander The Zone you’ll find quite a lot of scrap and weapon parts scattered around. Scrap is the currency used to buy goods while weapon parts are needed to upgrade your weapons. Along side these are artefacts. Artefacts are items from the time of the Ancients that are traded in for special abilities and bonuses (they serve no other purpose) these can range from a permanent discount at the store through to increasing your chances for a critical hit.
Certain characters are better for certain situations, for example Dux is almost entirely geared toward being a sniper while Bormin is much more about taking the brunt of the enemies attacks and distracting the enemy. This is mostly down to the mutations that unlock as your squad levels up. Each character has their own ‘mutation tree’, similar to the skill trees found in the Borderlands series, and what skills you pick will somewhat dictate how you use the character.
When you encounter a hostile, which is extremely regularly, you’ll see that each on has what I call a ‘zone of awareness’ that surrounds them. This zone represents how far they can see or hear. When you enter into stealth you can decrease the zones size, this is done by simply turning off your torch. Doing this will slow down your movement but also allow you to plan how to ambush the enemy… or sneak past.
This game suffers from some, what I like to call, eurojank. Which is some small elemental of the game that doesn’t quite work as intended. A fine example of this is when you control a character and sneak, if your companions are following you the enemy AI will ignore them so long as your character is hidden regardless of how obvious they are.
The game ends abruptly after what I think is a major plot hook, I assume that this is explored in more depth in the DLC (which I will be getting) or perhaps a sequel. Still, I have to say that the time I got out of this game I thoroughly enjoyed, I must admit though that the difficulty ramps up extremely quickly so be prepared for a challenge.
If this appeals to you perhaps try;
The X-COM Series
The Fallout Series
