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.
