GOTG Review: Mutant Year Zero

This is the next game in my Backlog Roulette series, where each month I spin a wheel to randomly select a game on my massive backlog that I must play (though not necessarily to completion). These wheel spins occur on the monthly preview episodes I co-host with my friends on The Casual Hour podcast.

I can’t remember the last time I shouted “oh, fuck off” as often as I did during my last Mutant Year Zero play session. 

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, the 2018 breakout turn-based tactical shooter from Swedish developer The Bearded Ladies Consulting, fools you into thinking you control the battlefield when in reality, the deck is eternally stacked against you. 

If you’ve read or listened to any content from Gamers on the Go before, you’ll know I love this genre. Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, Super Robot Wars, XCOM, Into The Breach, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars (a criminally overlooked launch title for the 3DS) — these are the kinds of games where I feel most at home. But being a big fan of a genre can be a double-edged sword, because now I’m pretty particular about what makes a good one of these. 

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was way better than it had any right to be.

Mutant Year Zero has some cool ideas, but it’s not “a good one of these.” Your ragtag group of mutants — a pig man named Bormin, a duck man named Dux and a…normal lady who sometimes kind of has nature powers named Selma (you do get a couple more recruits over the course of the story) — are Stalkers, a group of capable hunters and scavengers keeping humanity’s last bastion of hope, the Ark, from the brink of collapse. Complicating this are Ghouls, who roam the post-apocalyptic Zone outside of the Ark, looking to bring the whole thing down. And you need to use your cunning and strategy to stop them while also finding Eden, a place that may be a salvation for the ruined world. 

And therein lies my problem with Mutant Year Zero: my cunning just can’t make up for the amount of ways the game demands to fuck you over. One of the big selling points of MYZ is how you can explore areas in free roam until you or an enemy locks eyes and starts combat. This gives you an opportunity to pick up resources scattered around the environments or listen to your characters talk about the current events of the plot (which mostly involves Dux asking “isn’t this all kinda weird?” and Bormin saying “yeah, but shut the fuck up anyway,“) but most importantly, it allows you to scout and position your units to ambush enemies for the next skirmish. 

A snipe like this is the coolest the game gets, but it’s nothing you haven’t done a million times before in XCOM.

There’s something satisfyingly cool about posting my sniper up in an elevated position, then getting my tanky boar behind some cover down low to rush in and finish the job so that the enemies never know what hit them. This isn’t perfunctory either, as MYZ rewards you for being patient, doing a stealthy sweep of the area and even picking off a handful of stragglers with silenced weapons before it’s time to go loud and mop up whoever’s left. It’s a great system…when it works. But too often, engaging with these mechanics is a tedious or even impossible pain in the ass. 

Tactical games all hinge on information. When you have information available to you, you can make smarter, more strategic decisions that let you take down bigger or stronger enemies. For example, in Into The Breach, you are given perfect information about exactly what each enemy is going to do on their turn even before their turn has started. So it’s up to you to find the best way of mitigating or redirecting their damage to protect your units and the city. Fire Emblem lets you turn on enemy range indicators so you can bait out some enemy attacks one at a time while avoiding the wrath of a full army. XCOM does hide enemies in a fog of war that are too far away, keeping you from getting the full picture of a battle, but it’s easy to scan around the field and position your units to make the best of what you have. Mutant Year Zero however routinely makes it difficult to know what you’re up against until it’s much too late.

The first area you’re in is a dense, dark forest. Then you get to this snowy area with so much crap on the ground that you can’t really see anything effectively. And the zoomed out camera isn’t doing you any favors.

The environments are incredibly dark, with plenty of debris to further block your view. Enemies have vision rings around them, but they don’t appear until you’re very close to them, making it nigh impossible to know if picking off this close enemy is going to provoke and enemy much further away. And there’s no map (mini or otherwise) to help you get a lay of the land. You do get a compass at the top of the screen that tells you where your objective’s destination is, as well as the direction of nearby enemies, but enemies also move around, and there’s no way to tag them to better keep track of where they go. But the worst of the issue of the bunch is an oppressively locked isometric camera that doesn’t ever seem to give you good sight lines of where you’re going or what’s out there. You can’t plan around what you can’t see, which often leads to your attempted ambushes getting ambushed themselves as more enemies you couldn’t detect come out of the woodwork to oppose you.

To make matters worse, even if you are able to fully scout out an area, there aren’t many opportunities to clear out those stragglers before the big firefight, even though that is kind of the game’s central thesis. Even when you do find them (which takes a significant amount of time, both with the game’s glacial walk speed, and waiting forever for enemies to get into the right position on their patrol path), the enemies in these situations can often take more than one round of combat from your stealth weapons, leaving them in a position to call in backup and/or retaliate with an attack of their own. But more often than not, enemies will be found in stubbornly stationary pairs, which further complicates your goal of a silent execution to remove a threat from the board. Why would they make a core tenet of their game so difficult to achieve? I don’t have a good answer for you, but it leads to a lot of standing around waiting for a plan to fail, only so you can reload and wait even longer for it to fail in a slightly different way.

Be ready to see this screen a lot.

Once the bullets do start flying, you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage almost immediately. Your attack ranges are painfully short, while the enemy seems to be able to take shots at baffling distances. Even when you do have a shot, good luck hitting anything. While MYZ certainly has some XCOM: Enemy Unknown influences — especially in its UI which will feel instantly familiar — one of the ways it tries to simplify is in its hit percentages. MYZ only deals in percentages of 100, 75, 50, 25 or 0. It all makes for a lot of missing, especially on your overwatch shots, leading to many wasted turns of missing, followed by more wasted turns of reloading your weapons. Meanwhile, a Pyro enemy is tossing molotovs at you like they were going out of style, and you’ll find yourself loading up your last save time and time again, leading to further frustration. I knocked the difficulty down to its easiest setting, and still routinely found myself in impossible, or brutally attrition-filled situations, and this is a style of game I feel pretty comfortable with!

It’s not quite all negative. The characters have pretty enjoyable personalities, both in their aesthetics and their mechanics, each with a unique skilltree of mutant abilities you’ll unlock over time (Bormin’s knockdown tackle is a personal favorite since it gave me another crucial stealth damaging tool, incapacitating a target long enough to follow up with two or more shots from my other characters, stealthily finishing the job.) And while the quantity of weapons in the game is low, the variety within that small set is very nice, with a number of distinct firearms with added abilities like knockdown or incendiary rounds. You can also find armor out in the world, which will cosmetically be displayed on your characters during play (I gave a top hat to Dux, not just for the increased damage buff it gives him while on elevated terrain, but also just because it looked dapper.)

It’s a good hat! But also, this is a 75% shot? From my sniper character? Give me a break.

But those niceties don’t make up for the molasses walk speed, poor autosaves, murky environments and painfully inaccurate weapons, which all combine to make for an experience that is equal parts exhausting and annoying, even in a game that’s as short as 10-15 hours. The Bearded Ladies new game, Miasma Chronicles looks like a big improvement to many of my MYZ complaints: The environments are cleaner, better lit and easier to both navigate and survey, which could make a huge difference in my enjoyment if I play it.

But Miasma Chronicles is not the game my backlog wheel landed on, Mutant Year Zero is. And I can’t help but feel extremely disappointed. I’d heard many good things, and had often thought about playing it even before my backlog game required it. But unfortunately, a few fun ideas isn’t enough for it to rank in a genre packed with other excellent titles.