Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden Weapons

[Lawana Stuckert]

InMYZ, taking out an enemy with silenced weapons, from a hiding place, doesn't make their chums come running. This is easier said than done - fail to fell a lone foe in the first turn and they'll yell for help, or resort to high-damage options such as assault rifles and grenades and everyone's gonna know about it. You need to not pull the trigger unless you're sure you can finish the job silently, in a single turn. It's unfailingly difficult, because enemies almost always have more hitpoints than your silenced weapons have standard damage, but it's such a thrill.

What a glorious thing it is to slowly, painstakingly, silently transform an area patrolled by half a dozen rock-hard baddies into one that's just got one or two suddenly highly vulnerable guys left standing. Even more glorious is bungling an assassination, winding up in a thousand-degree frying pan as a result, and somehow surviving it. Your squad have/can unlock special abilities that enable you to regain control of a chaotic situation, but it's always seat of the pants stuff, shamelessly challenging and with tall demands on your patience and precision. It's the closest I've known a turn-based strategy game to feel like Dishonored or Hitman - making Mutant Year Zero a beautiful collision of gaming things I love.

Then it sweetens the deal further with overt Stalker vibes. Truth be told, my lip initially curled when terms such as 'Zone' and 'Stalker' were thrown around, with the exact same connotations - a post-disaster, post-human horror-wonderland and the grim-faced 'mutants' who scour it for ancient loot. I'm not familiar with the 80s, Swedish pen and paper RPG, Mutant, on which this is based, but, hey, Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky still spray-painted 'exisential sci-fi dread' all over that territory first.

(I came around to it, however, with a little mental gymnastics. MYZ is set several centuries after a terrible disaster, rather than a few decades, as in Stalker's case. As such, I chose to interpret its mutant animal-men, and their total bemusement about the ancient human structures and devices they stumble across in this ruined world, as being the millennia-hence consequences of Stalker's Zone somehow spreading to the rest of the world).

At its best, MYZ pulls something else from STALKER. Understated, exposition-averse world-building, a sense of place built from the blurry, implication-heavy shape of Something Bad Happened, Sometime rather than its tedious cousin Here Is Exactly What Happened, When And Why. Partly this is the sparse writing, but mostly it's the frequently astounding environmental art - devastation turned to green, wildness reclaiming a shattered human world of concrete and metal. Sure, The Last Of Us set this pace somewhat, but MYZ feels like its own beast - plus the pulled-out camera offers a new sense of scale, especially when MYZ is presenting ancient, crashed helicopters or the gutted, vine-woven frame of a multi-storey school.

Beauty abounds in the darkness of this Zone. The birds that scatter skywards as you walk, fingers of spectral light between lush trees, a shocking glimpse of snow... A combination of artists artisting and the Unreal engine Unrealing has achieved wonderful things here. My other turn-based joint this past week has been BattleTech Flashpoint, a stoic robo-war I enjoy greatly, but whose muddy palette, flat lighting and featureless landscapes now seem wholly without verve compared to MYZ's glowing collision of light and night.

All that lightly-sketched tone and all that quiet detail serve to mask an essential smallness to Mutant Year Zero. Aside from a few optional diversions into rock-hard bonus areas, you're railroaded down a fixed track, the sense of DIY coming from how you setup and/or survive a fight and not from where you go. Though you can revisit anywhere, once an area is exhausted of its dozen-odd enemies and smattering of loot (used for crafting very low-key weapon upgrades), that's it.

Weapons, abilities, squad members and enemy types are almost startlingly few in number, should you sit down to count them. Combat variety is more to do with where and when you bungle your play than any inherent difference in a given a scenario. The steel'n'neon base you sporadically return to for resupplies and upgrades is effectively three static scenes, while the slight plot is advanced almost exclusively through otherwise uncharacteristically over-written dialogue from one immobile character.

Only the latter, because it's one of very few aspects of MYZ that waste my time, bothered me in practice. Doing a lot with not a lot is, for my money, the single most impressive thing any game can do (particularly in this age of unbounded bloat from the biggest-budget titles). I'm so captivated by how this has me journey through a haunting otherworld in ways that border on an isometric walking simulator and then sets a taut, stealth-centric turn-based battlegame within it.

Gluttonously, I would like there to be more of it, in terms of having a wide choice of places to go or order to see them in. It's clear, however, that this has been done not from corner-cutting but to retain tight control over difficulty. If I could grind and loot away until my characters become super-gods, MYZ would lose something entirely vital to it - every single fight is frightening. The risk of being spotted too early, the certainty that more than one enemy can overwhelm my squad if they attack at once, forever riding the line between getting close (all the better for hit-percentage odds) and being seen or heard.

I've deliberately saved for last all discussion of Mutant Year Zero's outlandish posterboys, its bipedal, talking duck and pig Stalkers. Outwardly, they suggest a game playing mutation for laughs - as though Howard the Duck and a Ninja Turtles baddie went on a rambling holiday together. MYZ's final killer trick is that its animal characters (there's a fox-woman and someone slightly lizardy later too) almost immediately stop seeming absurd, and instead become as sad and broken as everything else in this desperate, ruined world. They don't know why they look like a pig and duck, they don't think it's funny that they look like a pig and a duck, and for much of the game they don't know if there any other animal-themed mutants (most every other type they've seen is a variant of the bandit-like 'ghouls' who roam the Zone).

Granted, MYZ takes a short while to find its tonal feet, and starts off making a few too many 'duck sounds like fuck' gags in the first hour, but the chaps' loneliness and self-loathing soon overrides that. I will say that that MYZ's usually sparse dialogue and aversion to cutscenes means there's almost no space for character to emerge - and later additions to your team are almost entirely defined by their combat roles, not their personalities - and with that I cared only about my own progress, not their goals. (There are, however, some Very Good Hats). It could stand to be far meatier that front, but I'd much rather have it this way than suffer a didactic torrent of cinematics and explication.

Again, I'm greedy. I want a bigger, beefier, more flexible Mutant Year Zero. But that's because the small, linear but smart, powerful and atmospheric Mutant Year Zero I got grabbed hold of me so completely.

Based on a tabletop roleplaying that in total is over thirty years old, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden follows titular mutants in a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated my mutated animals, humans, and scarred from the wars that came before. Combining open-world exploration, a leveling system, interchangeable party members, tactics, and the other aforementioned aspects, Mutant is a game that requires you to think, most of the time.

Accompanying this is a nifty crafting and upgrade system for guns and stats, which players go to the Ark to purchase with scrap or old world artifacts. Constantly improving weapons is a must, and I found the management of such, with the finite resources at my disposal, to be challenging, but almost fun. The weapons in this game are varied to a great degree, and while equipping the right characters with the right guns and grenades is essential, I found that the more damage, critical chance, and range it had, then the better off I was. Usually, there are a set number of weapons with high amounts of those numbers, and I found myself switching out characters with those specific weapons frequently. So, in one fashion, the weapons seem to provide different functions, but in essence none of them are very diverse. For example, there is a class of weapons that form some of the highest stats in the game, but none of them have the range of say, a sniper rifle (I only found assault rifle, shotgun, and pistol variants of the weapon type, so please bear with me if someone else found something I overlooked). So for my characters with better range, I had no choice but to equip them with these types of weapons, rather than play them the way I wanted. It just clashes with me on an internal level when I have to equip a character who is designed as a sniper with an assault rifle, just because of the damage.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden packs interesting combat, open world exploration and lore, and numerous systems that have the player invested in what their characters, but it ends on too early a note to really have any impact.

I am Nicholas Leon. My nickname is Nick, and it all started when I fired up Super Mario 64. I then moved on to the Zelda series (I beat Wind Waker on my dad's old save file a couple years ago) and other Nintendo products. I then moved on to Microsoft products where I have played the majority of my games.

I got into first-person shooters in middle school, and although my interest in them has subsided over time, there are still plenty of interesting titles in that area. My first foray into online gaming happened in high school with Battlefield 3.

It's all-too-common in the world of video games for developers to keep creating sequels to the same old series. Perhaps that's why it's so interesting to see a developer become inspired by a game that exists outside of the electronic gaming spectrum. That's just what The Bearded Ladies has done with Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. They've created a fresh new turn-based strategy video game based on a storied tabletop franchise, and while their efforts are certainly commendable, the titular road itself seems to be remarkably short.

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