Mutant Year Zero: The Road To Eden (2018) review

A mix of anthropomorphic post-apocalyptic roleplaying and turn-based tactics, Mutant Year Zero: The Road To Eden is based on the Swedish tabletop game of the same name. While it makes a striking first impression, a myriad of shortcomings ultimately hold Mutant back from reaching the heights the team behind it seem to be aiming for.

Set in the overgrown and radioactive ruins of civilization, The Road To Eden sees you control a squad of half-animal soldiers who venture out from the last-remaining bastion of civilization to bring back one of their own.

It's an intriguing premise with an unfortunate destination. Over the long haul, Mutant Year Zero proves itself tedious, shallow and generic. It’s rarely outright bad, but the whole thing ends up being a slog that even diehard fans of the genre will struggle to love.

Welcome to the jungle

Despite the colorful setup, Mutant Year Zero plays things pretty straight-faced. The tone here is grim and pulpy as hell. Although the writing here isn’t above poking fun at the fact that your initial two-man squad consists of a talking boar named Bormin and his wisecracking duck sidekick, Dux, it never mocks that conceited too harshly.

The source material is what it is, and Mutant Year Zero's unapologetic commitment to realising that very unique vision quickly proves itself to be one of its most endearing qualities.

Each level plays out in real time, with the goal being to sneak past hostile wastelanders, scavenge valuable items and reach the exit with your squad intact. Whenever you’re detected, the game snaps into a grid and you’re thrown into Mutant’s turn-based battle system. Each of your units gets two actions per turn, then the enemy units get two actions per turn. Smart play involves using cover to avoid damage and using each of your unit’s special abilities to turn the tide of battle in your advantage.

Back when I played the demo version of the game, I came away pretty impressed with Mutant Year Zero two-pronged approach. It’s super-satisfying to work your way through the game’s environments and pick off isolated enemies without breaking stealth, setting yourself up for an easier fight when you do choose to go loud.

Unfortunately, the odds seem so tilted against you that stalking is often the only way forward. Even on the lower difficulties, it feels like you aren’t so much winning fights as you are making them more difficult to lose.

Mutant Year Zero rarely stops throwing new and terrifying threats your way. Unfortunately, your squad of four units never feels quite equipped to deal with them.The difficulty curve in the game is generous enough on begin with but quickly escalates to a degree that’s hard to keep up with.

Towards the end of the campaign, Mutant Year Zero would throw dozens of enemies at me but it always felt like I barely had the resources to tackle about half that number. Many of these enemies would use crowd-control abilities to trim down my options further. A single unlucky shot or mistake would often set me back so far that winning was all but impossible. Every victory was won by the slimmest of margins.

All this is to say that while Mutant Year Zero presents itself as an RPG, the combat encounters in the game frequently veer towards being puzzles that leave little room for error. Too often, it felt like I was failing and flailing. I’d be reloading fights over and over until I inevitably managed to formulate the single string of critical hits and aptly-timed crowd-control abilities that’d allow me to triumph and proceed onward to the next encounter.

Unfortunately, the progression systems in Mutant Year Zero never really presented me with any interesting decisions. Many of the optional movement abilities you can unlock for member of your squad didn’t have much of an impact in how we approached fights and, beyond that, most of the upgrades on the menu tend to be passive and numerical in nature. What’s more, some of these abilities feel misleadingly described or outright bugged.

In any case, I managed to pretty-much min-max the skill trees for each member of our squad about halfway through the game. Before long, even the ordinary thrill of chasing experience points quickly lost its luster.

That said, there are some things that Mutant Year Zero: The Road To Eden does manage to get right. For one, you can fast-forward through your opponent’s turns – a feature that pretty much every tactics game out there ought to have but very few actually do.

However, even these strengths are saddled by a few odd interface quirks. Mutant Year Zero’s maps the fast-forward feature to the same button used to lock in your own actions. This meant that I’d sometimes hit the fast-forward button and accidentally waste a move or two – which was super-frustrating in the moment and could often result in a completely unsalvageable combat encounter.

Mutant Year Zero’s skewed perspective here also proved problematic. There’s no in-game mini-map, so you’re pretty much left to fend for yourself when it comes to navigating the game’s various locales. I constantly found myself manually crawling back over areas I’d already explored just because I didn’t want to take the risk of missing out on valuable resources.

The Bottom Line

The pitch for Mutant Year Zero: The Road To Eden is so unique that it’s genuinely disappointing to see it fall so short of what it could be. There’s a compelling setting and gameplay loop to be found here but sans any effort to build on that foundation beyond the obvious it doesn’t take long for the novelty to wear out its welcome.