Mutant Year Zero is a game done well, with few flaws and many postive aspects. Having purchased it on sale two years after release, many of its major bugs no longer plague me, even if some annoying ones remain. This game is challenging, requiring thinking and taking your time over brute force. I have had to save and reload often, which I find enjoyable. Particularly enjoyable for me is the focus on tactical combat without the need for constant attention to base-building, as in the X-COM series to which this is frequently compared. There is hardly a strategic layer besides basic squad management. This is mostly related to managing perks (mutations) and gear (which, sadly, is fairly limited) using two types of currency. This aspect of the game could certainly use improvement, as could the interface and and the treatment of a few remaining bugs. Hardly improvable, because simply excellent, is the general atmosphere - very well done! As if Tarkovsky's art-noire film "Stalker", to which the game sometimes seems to reference, were made into a dark hack-n-slash (Andrei Tarskovsky would probably be rolling in his grave, but who cares). Love the Swedish post-apocalypse setting! Despite its flaws certainly worth playing on sale. Terribly puzzling is the fact that its publisher, Funcom, does not seem to give feces towards its product. Its forums are ghostlands, abandoned soon after release. What's worse, the developers, a small Swedish team, have shown absolutely no interest in fostering a community, and nothing seems to be done with the game since 2019. Why?
While you *can* play this game as an "open-world RPG", there isn't much to it it terms of role-playing. The world is filled with "dangers", that require you to shoot, in locations lacking any form of raison d'etre or flavour. There are "hidden" dungeons abandoned for decades with candles burning inside, and monsters just waiting for you. Finally upgrading your skills so you can use one of those power rifles you have been carrying around for weeks, only to find those items are far inferior to your bow. Performing menial tasks for wooden, robot-like NPCs. No thank you, I'd rather clean my bathroom.
Sadly, I could not invest more than 45 minutes in this game without resigning. I did want to enjoy it, and was hopeful of finding the cute anime drawings enticing, enspiring, or at least entertaining. But sadly, this was not the case. While the artwork of the anime figures is par for the course, the figures themselves as characters are stereotyped tropes aimed, it seems, at an audience of young teenagers. The dialogue and writing is grossly subpar: Puerile catchphrases and saccharine wording. Being as it seems entirely lacking in irony, it lacks even entertainment value as humor. The gameplay seems on par for hex-based tactical games of the early 1990s, but an improvement on HoMM 1 it is not. I cannot recommend this game to anyone without a fetish for overused puerile anime tropes, and even for those people there are surely better-implemented games around.
