Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden Best Weapons

[Martta Borromeo]

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.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a strategy game from Funcom and The Bearded Ladies Consulting that I've had my eye on since its reveal earlier this year and one I have been looking forward to since I played it at E3 2018. As an avid fan of the XCOM series, the game caught my attention more so than other clones because Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden seemed to add its own unique twist to things with fully explorable environments and a niche world from a tabletop game.

Today, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden finally arrives for PC, PS4, and Xbox One and I was able to play quite a bit of it before launch. As I'm not done yet and my full review is still on its way, I still wanted to give you all a taste of what you can expect from the first hour or so once you pick up Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. While it does have a bit of a budgeted feel to it, the potential of its unique mechanics still looks promising towards the start of the adventure.

The game starts right in the thick of things with Dux and Borman, two mutants scavenging for materials. If you couldn't tell by their names, Dux and Borman aren't humans, they're an anthropomorphic duck and boar, respectively. Most things alive in the world of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden are mutants as well, as they are all that evolved to survive after a nuclear holocaust brought on by humanity.

As their current adventure is starting to wrap up, Dux and Borman are heading back to the Ark, the supposed last bastion of life on Earth. That being said, their knowledge worldview seems very narrow and naive, which will likely come into play in a big way later in the story. The first hour of the game does a good job at easing you into these characters' quirky personalities before sending them off on a mission to find the Ark's engineer and a skilled warrior who disappeared a few days prior.

While not much happens within the first hour of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, I still found myself very curious about the game's world. Likely, this is largely based on the fact that the game is based on an obscure 1980's Swedish tabletop RPG with a super interesting world with tons of untapped potential. After the first hour, I was definitely excited to see where the game's story was going and how its creative characters would be developed despite the mediocre voice acting.

As I mentioned before, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden operates similarly to XCOM once you get into a battle. You'll eventually have a wide variety of abilities to give your character the advantages like flight or increased damage absolution, though this isn't focused on as much early on. Still, it does manage to put you into some interesting fights with basic mutated enemies that will make strategy game fans feel right at home, even if they are a bit easy. That being said, the game's focus on stealth and exploration is the more interesting feature, especially early on.

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