Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

I played it only for an hour or so, but so far the game seems to be well crafted. The character voices kind of jump out of the ambience, but it is not too cringy to ruin the experience. The fighting is your basic x-com and such turnbased run and gun. The good part is free roaming and setting up for ambushes in the surroundings. Weapon ranges feel a bit off at least in the start as you can walk the same length as your range in one action. Looking forward to playing more of this and for any turnbased gamer at least giving this a chance is a must.

After completing the game on medium difficulty I have this to day about it. Preliminaries: Having played the original pen and paper rpg that the game world is based on back in the mid to late 80s this is kind of a nostalgia trip for me so I may be somewhat blinded to negative things someone else may notice so reader be ware! The Positive: The environments look good and give a distinct feeling of a post apocalyptic environment that is not that far removed in time from when the plague ravaged the world and the nuclear war broke out. If you speak Swedish you will notice a lot of things in the environments like road signs and store names being references to actual places and stores. The core gameplay is satisfying and while not as complex as for example XCOM it does a good job and does introduce some good mechanics like stealth. Voice acting and writing is good and some of the comments are just hilarious. The Neutral: The game is somewhat short, I don't consider this bad and with the currently available mechanics the game would in my opinion have been worse if it was much longer. Speaking of mechanics the games progression feels a bit unsatisfying, you don't really get better you just get some new abilities (some of which at least to me are markedly better then others) and acquire better weapons and armor. If there is a second game in the works I do hope they expand on this. The Bad: Sometimes the line of sight system truly annoys me it's no a common issue, but there are definite cases of how did he manage to shoot me from time to time. The mix of Swedish signs mixed with English like big Quarantine placards break my immersion more then I care to admit, though this will likely be of no concern unless you are Swedish.

This game has something that, for me at any rate, has been missing from a lot of games for a long time now. Fun. It's quirky, doesn't require hours of your life grinding repetitive daily missions. The 'missions' are broken up into bite size chunks and you can save anywhere, anytime, so thirty minutes for coffee and a sandwich break for lunch and I can flash this up and potter about without worrying about starting something huge. The quirkiness of the characters and the banter between them is as entertaining as the game play and reminds of the dialogue of the the old Bad Company games. Good, turn based games seem hard to find in these days of ever more graphic intensive, memory hungry, online slaughter-fests. Combining the adventure/exploration feel of Balder's Gate with the combat style of X-Com works incredibly well. And this game really is about stealth and using your teams abilities to maximum effect. At times, it almost feels like a puzzle game, working out which bad guys to pick off first, best use of the terrain, which characters and weapon combinations work best. Whilst individually many of the concepts, both story and technical game play are not original in themselves (but what is these days?) the way they've been woven together is simply games craftsmanship at it's finest. A lot of thought and passion has gone into the development of this game. You can almost feel the love the developers have put into it. My only gripe (well I had to have one)... I was looking forward to commanding a 4 mutant fire team rather than 3, but that may just be because of nostalgia from other games and TV tropes. Maybe in "Mutant: Year One. Beyond Eden"... for which I'll get my pre-order in now.

As a hybrid in RPG and tactics, this game does a really good job. The main two characters, the mutants Bormin and Dux are well written and their dark humour just fits perfectly into the post-apocalyptic setting. Exploring the zone is fun, graphics neat, combat works, also the well implemented stealth element is pretty unique for this type of games. But eh. Some hours into the game, one realises that there could be so much more. It definitely lacks of content. Be it weapon upgrades, equipment in general or enemies. There could be so much more, the game has high potential becoming a truly deep tactics RPG,. Concerning Combat and difficulty in general: I started the game on Hard difficulty but soon regreted it. The changes from Normal to Hard mode are brutal. The least concern here is the bigger health pool and damage output on your opponents, what made me come back to normal diff. was the fact that you don't auto heal after a fight and medipacks are not only rare, they also sell for a pretty penny, scrap-wise AND are limited in numbers! Also: It feels like the game wants to be played on normal, as the health pool of enemies on harder difficulties often is too big to still be able to stealth-kill a solo target in one turn. (At least in the beginning hours, where your character's skills are still extremely underwhelming.) As this is one of the core functions of Mutant Year Zero, this feels a bit unbalanced in general. I'm really looking forward to the upcoming dlc and hope for a content upgrade and some major tweaks in balancing! See you in the zone!

I originally played the demo. The demo impressed me so I bought the game. I had figured well now I had a taste, I might as well enjoy the whole dish. Well there is no whole dish. Story is subpar, an afterthought it seems like. I really enjoyed the quips the characters made when they found artifacts they didn't understand but there was no effort to expand on them and they just become part of game currency. Everything after that is just more rinse and repeat. They have created such a wonderful and amazing world but apart from a few lines by the characters, there is nothing more to it. Maybe I am being too harsh, I dont know. I felt the same way about XCOM 2. I felt it ended too soon.