Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

Bad combat mechanics ruin this otherwise great game. The story, voice acting, visuals, characters, etc are all superb, but having to plug each enemy with round after round just makes it tiresome. I get that you can sneak around a lot of situations, but most of the battles 8 hours in have been dissatisfying. It would just take tweaking a few combat-related properties to make this game much better.

This game plays like a worse version of XCOM with very heavy focus on stealth gameplay, set in post-apocalyptic Sweden. It ain't a bad game overall, especially in the first few hours but the longer you play the more you start to question its weird design decisions and unbalanced gameplay elements. Stealth focus in this game is so high that depending on your approach some encounters are either trivial or straight up impossible, even when it seems that they shouldn't be. This forces you to play a certain way (especially on higher difficulties) and limits player freedom in equipment and ability choice. For example, I had several frustrating moments where I wanted to shoot someone partially-hidden behind a wall but the game was giving me "NO CHANCE TO HIT" info box that prevented me from shooting them when my character had a heavy weapon capable of destroying covers. A single shot from that weapon at the wall would have obliterated it, but I simply couldn't do that. Another head-scratching moment I've encountered was in later stages of the DLC campaign when enemy health bars and armour values got so high that a generic mutated wild dog could easily take 3-4 shots from a railgun-like weapon while my character in heavy armour could die after getting hit by a single shot from the same gun. Gameplay and balance issues aside, the game's humour became annoying and heavily overused after first few hours, I'm talking about situations where you e.g. find an old boat in dried-out lake and one character in the party goes "StUpID hUmAnS bUiLd BoAt oN lAnD", or when they find an old blowtorch and say something about "ancient candles being inefficient". It could have been funny if it was done once (or differently in general) but the game just keeps throwing this type of humour at you constantly through its entire duration. On top of all that, the game is riddled with bugs and glitches, from AI losing path when you're in a building on the floor above them to UI getting stuck while trying to change grenades. Additonaly about every 4th encounter one of my characters would get spotted while they were sneaking behind a wall, or I would waste my action point because a character in my party suddenly forgot how to use a ladder and got stuck next to it. Its a shame that the game was left in this state after release, is has solid foundations and majority of my criticism could have been solved with a patch or two. In its current version, I can't recommend it.

Economy and bad math calculation I really wanted to love Mutant Year Zero. Early on, mixing real-time stealth with XCOM combat in a post-apocalyptic world feels like a breath of fresh air. But as you progress, the game completely falls apart due to infuriating, half-baked balancing that turns a fun tactical shooter into a stressful chore. The 3-Mutant Bottleneck: Restricting your squad to three mutants locks you into a rigid, one-way-to-play puzzle. Because you must silently eliminate patrols before a fight starts, you are forced to run the exact characters who can use silent weapons. True tactical freedom doesn't exist. Dumpster-Tier Economy: Weapon parts are hidden like diamonds, and upgrading a weapon to Level III barely bumps your damage. Your base squad output gets hard-capped around 17–18 points total per turn. Broken HP Scaling: The developers jack mid-game enemy health pools up to 24+ HP while keeping your damage artificially low. It turns a strategy game into an impossible math puzzle where you have to stack rare critical modifiers and pray to the RNG gods just to kill a single standard patrol. If you are coming from XCOM expecting squad growth and strategic expression, stay away. It’s a rigid puzzle with missing pieces. Uninstalled and moving on.

The summary for this game is a strategy game without any strategy. Most of its issues stem from the very small squad size, 2 units initially then maxing out at just 3 units. Add to this enemies with large health pools and armour and what you end up with is repeated missions where you simply focus fire on the closest enemy with your entire squad to kill 1 enemy a turn. The small squad size means that any missed shots feel extra harsh, and a unit getting knocked down or mind controlled will remove a third of your damage and most likely lead to getting overrun. Progression also feels restricted due to limitations on how skills are equipped. Skills are typed, and only 1 of each type can be equipped. This often meant unlocks did nothing, as the small tech tree forces the player to unlock skills they don't want to progress to skills they do want. Between engagements you'll be scavenging the map for scrap, a significant time sink with no skill required other than staying awake. The magic of turn based tactics games comes from commanding a large and varied set of characters each with their owns strengths and weaknesses, then combining their abilities with the environment to make the player feel like a strategic genius. Here we have 3 mutants with roughly the same gun trading blows with similarly equipped foes. I didn't find the magic.

It's just so tedious, you are forced to play a very specific way or else you just get infinited by 16 robots or tazed by psykers from 40k, cant shred armor, which they forgot to steal from xcom like they did with every other system in the game, so tanky enemies can bowl thru your team, resources are very finite so you just run out of medkits then run out of money for medkits, try to stealth kill an enemy, you simply dont have the damage to do it so you have to take on the entire fortress. maybe its a skill issue, but as an xcom fan, it just seemed very spaghetti, uncohesive. i liked the world, liked the environment, but the systems need more. feels like the game was made for having 4 mutants at once and at the end someone just decided, "nah, lets only let them have 3" right before the game released.

Like others have said, there is only one way to successfully play this game, so you're not making tactical choices, you're just trying to guess what the developers had in mind for that specific encounter.

[h1][b][i] MUTANTES Y COMBATES TÁCTICOS [/i][/b][/h1] Mutant Year Zero es el primer juego de The Bearded Ladies, estudio que a día de hoy ya lleva 3 juegos con la misma temática, ser tácticos estilos XCOM, pero que nos sueltan en mundos semiabiertos. En su día esta primera entrega fue un juego que disfrute mucho y he vuelto a hacerlo, todo esto gracias a su sistema de combate muy bien logrado y el gran enfoque en la exploración que tiene. Aunque hay algunas decisiones de diseño bastante cuestionables y que no me gustaron, pero que aún así, es un excelente juego táctico que se sigue manteniendo muy bien. A lo que respecta a su combate, resulta ser un juego bastante humilde pero también muy bueno y entretenido, pese a que es un juego que se centra demasiado en el sigilo para mi gusto, pero que aún así y gracias a la libre exploración, nos ira dejando planteando los combate de como enfrentarlos a nuestro gusto, en grandes escenarios que se pueden ir destruyendo a medida que combatamos. Todo esto también gracias a un buen repertorio de habilidades para cada uno de nuestros personajes, siendo de 3 tipos, pasiva, leves y fuertes, que se podrán combinar tanto en sigilo como en acción. Aunque también algo criticable la decisión de que solo exista una ranura para los 3 tipos de habilidades en los personajes, o que directamente algunas se repitan entre estos. Desde el mismísimo primer mapa, hasta con el ultimo de sus juegos, he pedido ver el enorme talento que tiene esta gente para el diseño de escenarios y ambientaciones postapocalípticas. Cada uno de ellos cuentan con un gran nivel de detalle, llenos de caos y destrucción, pero también mostrando el avance de la naturaleza en términos gráficos, pero además en términos de jugabilidad, ya al ser mapas de libre exploración, tendremos a disposición varios lugares para el elegir para posicionarnos a la hora de iniciar los combates a nuestro gusto. Ese muy buen diseño también se ve en cada uno de los personajes, desde esos enemigos normales, hasta los enemigos acorazados, mutantes o los mechas que iremos enfrentando a lo largo de la aventura. Obviamente tampoco podrían faltar los protagonistas, que fueron lo que más llamaron la atención desde el primer trailer, siendo que además de su gran diseño, tienen una gran personalidad y carisma, con diferentes reacciones a la hora de avanzar en su entretenida historia, en la cual esta centrada en descubrir el origen de ellos mismos. [h1][b] [u] PROS:[/u] [/b][/h1] [list] [*]Tiene un sistema de combate y gestión muy simple, pero también uno que se disfruta mucho, todo gracias a que podremos encarar los combates a nuestro gusto. [*]El diseño de escenarios y ambientación por parte de esta gente es realmente excelente. Con escenarios postapocalipticos que no solo se ven realmente bien, si no que en lo jugable nos ofrecen diferentes formas en la cuales podremos ir avanzando o enfrentar a los enemigos gracias a su libre exploración. [*]No solo sus diseños destacan mucho en sus escenarios, cada uno de sus personajes también están muy bien diseñados. Desde los mutantes enemigos, acorazados o los diferentes mechas, y claro, principalmente cada uno de sus protagonistas, que además tienen un gran carisma y personalidad. [/list] [h1][b] [u] CONTRAS:[/u] [/b][/h1] [list] [*]Cada personaje solo cuenta con 3 ranuras de poderes para equipar, algo que no me termino de gustar por tener que estar cambiando a cada momento entre estas, además de que varios poderes se repiten entre personajes. [*]Creo que lo que menos me gusto del juego, es su gran enfoque en el sigilo, el cual estaremos prácticamente obligado a hacer si queremos avanzar. [*]Se nota mucho la falta de algún jefe en las zonas. [/list] Al volver a rejugarlo recientemente, lo he vuelto a disfrutar como el primer día ya habiendo pasado increíblemente 7 años desde entonces, y aunque el enfoque que tiene en los combates no me terminan de gustar, continuando siendo un excelente juego táctico para recomendar. En un género que fácilmente puede ser muy pesado para algunos debido a que la mayoría de los juegos suelen durar muchísimas horas, en este sentido es un juego que la mayoría podrá disfrutar, al ser una experiencia con mecánicas simples y una duración justa.

Ролевая игра с пошаговыми боями в очень интересном, постапокалиптическом сеттинге. Не очень люблю подобный жанр, но понравилась графика, понравилась цветовая гамма и решил попробовать сначала на торренте, а уже потом купил здесь. Все говорят, что похожа на игру ХСОМ, но я в неё ни разу не играл и особо сравнить мне не с чем. Может быть только с серией Divinity. Прикольные персонажи, которые тоже привлекают своим видом. Это огромный хряк и утка, типа танк и снайпер. Потом по ходу сюжета, вам добавляются новые спутники и их тоже можно использовать. Они между собой болтают и разбавляют прохождение сюжета. Металлолома (местный ресурс) не хватает, поэтому нужно шерстить все углы (буквально) и тогда получится хорошо апгрейдить оружия. Если вам нравятся тактические игры, то обязательно берите, но лично я проходил на несложных уровнях, так как эти бои итак затяжные и не темповые. Очень прикольный проект. Правда почему-то DLC стоит конских (для него) денег.

Genre - Turn based combat with stealth 5.5/10 Disappointingly boring and waste of good lore imo. I got this game a while back as loved the look of the game and the story sounded interesting. I'd read reviews that actually put me off trying the game. However, I thought I need to give it a proper try. All I can say is what a shame... The characters and setting are great, but the turn based combat that is the game has been made a boring chore. I get that you are a Stalker, and they want to encourage you to use stealth to pick off enemies. But the game has restricted the player too much with it's own mechanics. You get two guys at the start, only one has a silent weapon, so the other guy shouldn't be used until a fight kicks off. So imagine crawling around a map looking for loot and shooting enemies with one character. Now when a fight kicks off the game should get interesting, but it just doesn't. The enemies at the start (I assume they'll get worse later) are made up of charge at you with melee (fair enough) and high life camping snipers. The first lot are standard, but the snipers can kill you with two hits from a long range, take at least two hits from a close range and always go for cover. I just could not get into this game and ultimately found it boring, which is crazy as it could be right up my street. However, I am not really into stealth-centric games, so maybe if you like things like the Commando and Shadow Tactics series of games you will really enjoy it.