Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

This game looked right up my alley. Snarky mutants, turn based tactical combat, looting urban ruins. The writing is hackneyed and a little too on the nose with its attempts at humor but I was more than wiling to give that a pass for some solid gameplay, which I soon found was far worse than initial impressions would indicate What really kills the experience is that you have to eventually kill every enemy in order to progress, and some encounters ("High Road" being an egregious early example) leave you with precisely zero tactical options, forcing you to take tons of damage whittling away at enemies life bars. Damage is only healable with medkits that cost a considerable amount of money; even back at the home base area, you have to buy and use medkits to heal. With the more lousy enemy formations, you essentially have to savescum on every round in order to never miss and get as many crits as you can in order to brute force your way to victory. Taking extra damage because you missed a single shot can render the game unwinnable in future battles and force you to reload an earlier save or even start the whole game over (personally I'd opt for uninstalling). Stealth is only important for initial positioning before starting battle. If you don't 100% kill an enemy with silent weapons in the first round of ambushing them, they are guaranteed to alert every other enemy on the map to your exact location and then stealth is completely out the window. Even non-boss enemies have absurdly massive health meters and armor for no apparent reason, making them a huge pain to take down. Nearly invincible healing robots run halfway across the map to revive enemies you already killed. The whole experience of trying to play this game just sucks and feels bad. I'd be all for a game that's stacked against you if you were given good opportunities to overcome all odds, but the lack of proper map/encounter design prevents that. This is the framework of a good game with poor execution.

I enjoyed my first hours of this game immensely. The great voice acting and level design had me fully immersed. At this point i would have given the game a 4 or 5 rating. But due to the problems that follow i no longer want to play the game. But then things start falling apart. The main quest line, which was conveyed as urgent and important, cannot be done untill i have reached a higher level. In fact i have to go back to every area and kill every enemy in order to attain the level the game desires. This would not typically be a problem since i usually enjoy exploring and make an effort to fully investigate the map. But since enemies do not drop any loot of consequence i had skipped any enemy that was not guarding something i wanted. But even after returning to kill every enemy i have now reached the point where even with my whole squad having fully upgraded silent weapons 9 of 10 enemies have too much health to be stealth killed. Rendering it pointless.

I wanted to enjoy this game all the way. It has style, a neat storyline, really cool characters, and the world feel is great. Then, the combat system shows up and completely kills it. It waits awhile before doing so. Midway through the game, you'll start to feel like you aren't progressing properly. You'll think you've been doing what you should to play through the areas like you should. You upgrade your weapons and abilities according to the knowledge you have so far in the game... But, the areas just get worse and worse, and demand more and more perfection. You have to do stealth kills by systematically hitting stragglers otherwise you'll trigger the ENTIRE MAP of enemies with three to four times your health and pay no attention to even the best cover you find. Enemies with some of the same abilities as you, but NONE of the limitations you have to suffer. Soon you realize you aren't playing a role playing game... You never were: This is a "Turn-based Min-Maxer Perfectionist Puzzle" game masquerading as an role-playing game. Simply put, there are only a few viable routes to play the game. Otherwise you'll reach a point you will not be able to progress and you'll have to restart all over to undo the mistakes you unknowingly made... Because the game never indicated or told you they were mistakes, and even presented them a good options. There's limited scrap, limited parts, and limited skill points. There's weapons you shouldn't upgrade, skills you should not get, and XP you HAVE to get. And, the RNG has been decided the moment you started a new game and will not change. The combat system is similar to modern X-Com's... And that's a bad thing. Takes the core of that system and amplifies the worst parts of it, and then couples it with a limited economy to devastating results. Simply put: If you don't play this game perfectly you will hit the wall hard, and will have to restart all over again. So much good, wasted by very awful gameplay designers.

I loved the voice acting. Artwork as well was beautiful and the scenery was pretty good. The characters I didn't find exciting. Seems really short on writing. It's heavy on combat, which I didn't find exciting and got tired of really quickly. The ending on the cliffhanger is pretty good.

I have two major issues with this game: 1. It's too repetitive for me Whole game is a cycle of Fighting->looting/exploring-> go back to town for supplies There is not much story, no decisions, character leveling/development is pretty limited. Maybe it was just a wrong type of genre for me. 2. RNG I hate the way RNG is implemented in this game. It just makes you want to save scum or cry when you miss all your important shots and you dont get that many of them. I'd much rather preferred % system from Divinity: DOS2 In the end, I stopped playing it after about 8 hours.