MUTANT YEAR ZERO: ROAD TO EDEN
How do you stay warm behind cover? Duck down
XCOM, BUT WITH A TALKING DUCK, is a fine elevator pitch, and might have been enough on its own to get this greenlit. But
MutantYearZero’s Swedish developer has taken the source material—a pen and paper RPG we hadn’t heard of—and built something wonderful on top.
There’s also a talking pig, along with a sniper fox who sounds like she came from
MetalGearSolid. You can mutate them in many ways, from stone skin that shrugs off damage to gigantic moth wings, taking flight to improve line of sight to target in the same way XCOM’s snipers could.
There’s a lot of XCOM about the game, with differing levels of cover, overwatch, hit percentages, and weapon mods, but Mutant sprouts enough of its own pseudopods to stand out. While combat is turn-based, exploration is done in real time, and there’s a focus on stealth as you order characters to douse their flashlights and hunker down when you think enemies are near. XCOM’s infiltration missions are mirrored in the way you can set up ambushes, but Mutant’s are less satisfying, particularly early on when your best gun holds only one shot.
The difficulty makes stealthy planning a necessity, and it’s upsetting to have your strategy undermined by enemies who call for reinforcements who appear from behind, when you’ve carefully picked your cover positions to defend against a frontal assault. The importance of ambushes also makes battles play out in similar ways—you sneak up, deliver a blow from cover, then mop up. Unless the ambush went wrong, in which case you restart.
Where the game does win out is in personality. The world-building sees mutants scratching a living hundreds of years after a non-specific catastrophe, the ruins of human civilization still visible, but being reclaimed by plant life. It’s an artful, well-designed game that encourages you to explore by dotting loot around—but then forces you to take it back to base before using it to upgrade. Thankfully, there’s a fast travel system.
It’s also well written, the voice acting and enemy barks raising many smiles before becoming repetitive. It continues adding enemies well past its mid-point, but becomes too reliant on beefing them up with additional hitpoints, and has little niggles, such as the mouse wheel doing nothing when you expect it to zoom out.
Overall, Mutant’s world is a fun place to explore, and its characters are well rounded and well written. However, it feels as though it doesn’t quite deliver on its potential, progressing too slowly, with too much aimless wandering about, and too many failed ambushes, to be the kind of success a game featuring a talking duck deserves.