Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Review – Short yet satisfying game

One of the highly anticipated games of the year, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden launched last week. Following the release of its trailer, the game garnered a huge following and popularity. We recently played the game and decided to review the game.

Story

The story follows a group of Stalkers scavenging for the survival of their community. Throughout the story, we get to learn what happened to the human race in the game’s post apocalyptic world. Unfortunately, fans who expect a long game will be disappointed as the story is relatively short. As for the characters, the game does not expand on their characterization outside of party banter until the end of the game.

Gameplay

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden features 5 playable characters. Each character can learn abilities from 4 different categories: Major Mutation, Minor Mutation, Passive Mutation and passives. Players can only equip 1 ability from each mutation while the passives are always online once obtained. This means that players have to determine the roles of their characters before committing to a certain ability.

On the other hand, resources are limited in this game. This forces players to be very careful with what they spend on in game. In hard mode, the limited resources extremely hurt the player’s team as the characters will not heal in the home base. Furthermore, limited resources also mean less areas to explore. As most of the areas tie directly to the story, that means that the game becomes very short (game ends when the story ends).

Exploration in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is painfully long. Surprisingly, the game does not have a minimap feature thus relying on the player’s memory to guide them through. Moreover, even with the torchlight on, your characters move at a slow pace. The general darkness of the area does not help matters as it becomes easy to miss out on loot.

Combat

Combat in this game resembles that of the XCOM series. The game features turn-based combat where the AI responds to player movements. One of the more interesting aspects of the combat system is the skill cooldown. In order to recharge a skill, players need to kill a certain number of enemies to do so.

On the other hand, stealth killing should be a priority for players. Due to only having 3 characters at all times, players will often find themselves in a number disadvantage. The game encourages scouting to determine enemy locations and strategic points to gain the advantage. Like XCOM 2’s scouting, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden brings a different look to combat outside of just fighting your way through with brute force.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden puts a lot of focus into resource management as well as strategic combat. In addition, it features characters that are likable. However, the game’s primary drawback is its short duration and low replay-value due to lack of secondary missions and open exploration.