Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden

PC, PS4, Xbox One

At first, it seems a simple rule. During your turn, your character can either move and take an action, or sprint to cover more ground and take no action. Since it was popularised in 2013’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, it’s been fascinating to see how that rule has introduced a new sense of dynamism to a genre in which games can easily feel staid. Just look at the diversity of games in which it’s featured, from 2D platforming tactics in SteamWorld Heist to BattleTech, where it’s a natural partner to a strategy setting.

The latest take on the act-or-leg-it format is Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden, which strikes a distinctive profile, what with its lead characters being an anthropomorphic pig and duck. The pig is Bormin, the gruff de facto leader of your troupe of Stalkers, and Dux is, well, a duck. He’s a cocky upstart, all beak and no respect. They live in the safety of the Ark, outside of which lies the Zone, a tract of Sweden which, following global warming, plague and a nuclear war, is infested by raiders, robots and mutated dogs. As Stalkers, it’s their job to go out there to find supplies for the city, and now, following the disappearance of a member of the Ark’s community, it’s up to them to find him.

To any STALKER player, this setting will seem familiar, and Beyond Good & Evil fans might have their eyebrows raised at its character design, but this game’s inspirations lie in Mutant, a pen-and-paper RPG which was first published in 1984 and was updated in 2014 as Mutant Year Zero. The depth of its source material lends the game a strong tone, which swings between the gallows humour voiced by your characters, comicbook violence, and poignant detail built into a world scattered with sprawling skeletons, overgrown huts and roads choked with moss-covered camper vans. It’s a world worth exploring, and rather surprisingly for a turn-based tactics game, that’s exactly what you get to do. While most tactics games are set in discrete arenas that are generated or custom-designed simply for combat, Mutant Year Zero takes place in linked, open levels. Moving through the world in realtime, finding scrap and weapon parts to buy items and upgrade your weapons, lends the world a coherence that’s usually missing in the genre, and gives you a fine sense of embarking on a journey.

As you work through each area toward your next quest marker, you’ll encounter enemies, such as Ghouls, the raiders who live in the ruins, mutated Zone dogs, and robots. They’re all bad, of course; they’ll attack, initiating combat as soon as they detect you, taking the first turn. Unless, that is, you sneak by them, crouching so you reduce the size of their radius of awareness, or if you initiate combat so that you take the first turn.

Stealth is Mutant Year Zero’s key twist on the genre. You can use it to skirt around many encounters, though you’ll miss out on valuable XP to buy new abilities and chests that contain new armour and weapons. You might also miss Artifacts, objects from the old world such as iPods and Commodore 64s which you can cash in for party-wide boosts. More importantly, you use stealth to start fights on your terms. The game’s tooltips are keen to advise you to pick off lone enemies, stealth-killing them with Dux’s crossbow and Selma’s silenced pistol, before they get to take their turn and call for backup. In the early game, thinning the opposition to even the odds for your party of three is a necessary tactic, but by the mid-game it becomes untenable, your silent weapons dealing too little damage to higher-level enemies. It also becomes tedious to begin every encounter by trying to pare down stragglers.

A more rewarding way to use stealth is to move your characters into positions that suit their strengths before springing the trap. Dux has a passive skill that doubles his critical chance when he has a height advantage, so give him a long-range rifle and put him on the top of a climbing frame or in an upper window. Magnus can control enemies’ minds for a turn, giving breathing room and an extra gun on your side, so position him close to a Shaman, so he can possess it and stop it from summoning extra enemies. Bormin is best in front, taking the brunt of enemy attention, his Stone Skin ability allowing him to shrug off all damage for a turn and his Spore Cloud surrounding him in concealing smoke if he gets hit.

The five characters you’ll eventually choose between for your party have many skills to explore, but you’d also better be upgrading your weapons, raising their damage output and critical chance rate, while finding and equipping the right gear, including weapon addons which can give a chance of setting organic targets on fire or EMP-stunning robots. Strategising effective loadouts of skills and equipment is engrossing, but you’ll find yourself having to fast-travel back to the Ark to refit your addons at the weapon shop, based on the balance of enemies ahead. After all, by the second half of the game the real challenge comes in raising your damage output to keep up with the way the game, rather disappointingly, tends to raise enemy difficulty by increasing the size of its health bars.

Also underdeveloped is Mutant Year Zero’s abrupt ending. Since enemies don’t respawn, you probably won’t have had the opportunity to explore all your characters’ abilities by the point the story reaches its conclusion, and there’s no endgame in which to enjoy your achievements. It’s a wrench to have to say goodbye to your mutants, not only because you’ve been through so much together but also because other tactics games are more open-ended. While it lasts, Mutant Year Zero presents a fresh and involving take on the genre, but its linearity isn’t quite such an ideal fit.

In the early game, thinning the opposition to even the odds for your party of three is a necessary tactic