It’s (sadly) rare to see a mid-budget release in this day and age, but Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, based on the newest variation of the Swedish tabletop franchise Mutant called “Mutant – År Noll”, is exactly that. It’s a game made by a rather small studio with the support of Funcom on Unreal Engine, that tries to do a lot, while also clearly trying to be very smart with budget planning for every little thing. It’s also a curious mix of a turn-based action RPG with tactical combat similar to the XCOM reboot, a stealth game and light survival elements in regards to very tight resource planning. And it succeeds more often than it fails.
The setup is pretty simple – an apocalypse happened, you control a small team of mutants, the only settlement they know of is a city called Ark, they haven’t seen any other mutants, world is mostly filled with aggressive bands of ghouls, you need to help the settlement, water chips are not involved and neither is anyone named Strelok. Despite the latter two, there are countless callbacks to other post-apocalyptic series, with S.T.A.L.K.E.R. terminology used for several key things, like the world around the settlement being called The Zone while groups of Zone explorers are named Stalkers. Not like any similarities or references would matter if the story was solid on its own, but I’d say it’s more “serviceable” than “interesting”. So if you’re interested in this aspect, I’d suggest rather checking things like Wasteland 2 or something similar for a nice dose of post-apocalyptic fiction, where the world, the characters and the narration are far better written and stand on their own.
The main draw of the game instead is that mix of stealth and tactical turn-based RPG mechanics that I’ve mentioned. Basically, it works like this – when exploring one of the locations you have 2 main modes of walking out of combat – normal exploration and sneaking. Normal exploration shows more of the map, and in colour and also lights up any resources that your flashlight shines on, but also makes you more visible. Whenever enemies are near, which is often easy to predict as either the location would get clearly more dangerously looking, or dialogue will be heard or the red dots on the compass will appear, they have a circle of visibility which is wider and quicker if you’re in the normal exploration mode. Personally, I never got into a situation where I ran into a fight as the game tends to give you enough time to react and quickly sneak and get out of the way of any patrolling enemies, so usually there’s no need to sneak all the time.
When you’re in sneak mode and can get closer to enemies you can also hide in cover, that seems to make you completely invisible even if the enemy is looking right at you, and prepare an ambush by separating the team and setting it in good positions. If you perform the ambush (and don’t get noticed by the enemies) you have an entire first round of attacks that you can perform with silent weapons, so not to alert anyone who might be standing farther out in the location. If you manage to kill or disable the enemy during that round and don’t get heard/seen by other enemies, you can finish the fight without alerting anyone else (if the enemy is just knocked out it needs to be killed first, but you have more rounds to do that). Even if other enemies stumble upon a dead body, they won’t react, by the way. And because of this, what often happens is that you scout the area in search of enemies that can be picked off on their own, killing especially troublesome enemies and et cetera before engaging the rest in a more loud manner and having a (more) manageable amount of enemies to deal with.
It’s a brilliant idea, really, and makes you think about the fights in a way that is very different from XCOM and recent Shadowrun games. Oh, and you need to do this too, especially if you plan to play on the “intended difficulty” mode that is Very Hard. Yep, you read that right. The game has 3 difficulty modes – Normal, Hard and Very Hard. Hard is suggested for New Game, and Very Hard is marked as intended. Which is extremely confusing… But I can see why this happened. Game wants to be about being constantly outgunned and overpowered so you stealth kill as many enemies as you can before fighting, so you stealth around some groups avoiding them completely until you can backtrack to them later to get XP and items they could be guarding. And Very Hard mode enforces that in a really strict way – you can only restore health via med-packs, that are rare and expensive and enemies deal a ton of damage if you try to deal with them head-on. Which is extremely tough if you’re not good at planning your team and being smart about stealth.
Yet, I’ve switched off from Very Hard to Normal about 1/3 in because after clearing out the first main route of the journey and some optional stuff, it became clear that some things about balance just feel off. Stealth killing enemies becomes extremely tough and eventually almost impossible as the game goes on, since even if you max out any possible damage and critical damage output of your silent weapons, even if you abuse every single trick to knock them out and not alarm anyone, they start having way too much health or being set up in groups that get alerted as soon as one of them dies. Stealth avoiding some groups until later also becomes an issue at that point as the game starts becoming very clear about you needing to kill to get experience and level up the abilities and finding better gear. And some areas seem to not even be designed for stealth avoiding and backtracking as you might get spawned almost in the middle of enemies upon returning to it from a certain side. Add to that rather inconsistent rules for how enemies hear your shootouts as I had both people look at giant exploding robots and not bat an eye and running across the entire location after a single gunshot was heard. And occasional bugs. And as a result, the game just becomes a bit annoying when played “as intended” after a while.
What Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden tries to do is great. And for the most part, it does it really well and provides a really fun and unique experience with a creative use of different systems and ideas influenced by other games. But there are countless minor and some major annoyances that make the game less enjoyable. There are still some occasional weird bugs and strange camera behaviour. And the story and the world, despite the amazing potential, just never really picks up or becomes something actually fun or interesting, which is a shame. I would still recommend checking this game out, especially if you’re in the mood for some stealth-heavy tactical combat, but hope that there will be a sequel of some sort that will be easier to recommend without any “but”-s.