Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (Xbox One)

Since tabletop RPGs are the progenitor of video game RPGs, it’s not too surprising to see them get adapted into video games. While Dungeons and Dragons and Shadowrun have had multiple titles using their ideas and systems, there are plenty more tabletop RPGs that have yet to take the step into digital gaming, and for a while, this was the case with Mutant. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden sets out to be the series’s first step into the digital realm, using the RPG’s most recent expansion Mutant – Year Zero as a foundation for a new original story.

After the world has been devastated by plague and nuclear war, very little of the world has managed to hang on. Many people have been transformed into murderous Ghouls who patrol the hostile wasteland known as the Zone, but others have been mutated by the radiation into new forms. The game begins with two such mutants, Bormin and Dux who are a humanoid boar and a humanoid duck respectively doing work as Stalkers for the Ark. The Ark is supposedly the last safe place in the Zone where people can coexist peacefully with clean water, food, and other resources, but it’s because of the Stalkers who head out in the Zone and risk their lives for such things that this civilization can continue to survive. Things begin to look dour for the Ark though when its main technological expert goes missing, chasing the idea of a place called Eden that is meant to be a more stable place people can live in peace freely. Bormin and Dux are sent off to track the man down in the wastelands, learning more about the Zone and its history along the way as well as meeting other mutants who can help them with their important quest. Without saying how this specific quest ends, it does feel like this journey does come to a somewhat abrupt end. It does wrap up the main story of the game, but it also seems like the game would have benefited from a few more plot events added to the end to follow up on certain loose ends. There are optional areas in the game to explore at least, but those are often more for color or combat experience and rewards, with only one really major subquest popping up in the whole of the game to add more story to it.

The world of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is well-realized though, but the game doesn’t spend as much time as the player might hope exploring its history. One interesting aspect though are The Ancients, which is pretty much their term for us, the humans who existed well before the devastation that created their world. Most of The Zone’s areas are the husks of our society, and with their present so far removed from ours, the characters struggle to try and understand our buildings and technology. Since they rely mostly on scrabbled together weapons and the rusty remains of what we left behind, seeing them try and figure out the purpose of something like an iPod can be quite amusing, them mistaking it for a device that determines a fruit’s quality due to its Apple logo. These items can be pretty rare though and its actually one of the few times you can get a good look at the characters’ personalities. Bormin narrates the main plot, but interaction between the core group is pretty minimal outside of first meetings and the few major plot beats. You can still glean enough to know that Bormin is a gruff, serious type and Dux is the wise-cracking nervous one, but that’s pretty much the extent of their characters. The few other characters who can join your crew out in the wasteland are about as surface level as well, although Farrow, the British fox character, does talk a lot, but that just comes in the form of her shouting her name and taunts during a battle. Like the world, the characters are interesting but underexplored conceptually.

There are, however, plenty of battle environments to explore. Combat in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden takes the form of turn-based battles where positioning and cover are key. Winning in a battle requires smart use of the area around you to protect your characters and gain an edge over opponents with things like the high ground, choke points, and good cover not only important for having an advantage, but just for survival in general. The areas you’ll be fighting in tend to consist of the ruins of modern architecture, areas like plane wrecks, abandoned train yards, broken highways cluttered with rusted cars, and dilapidated buildings being common battlegrounds as well as places to explore for the game’s scrap currency and notes on the game’s world and lore for what there is on offer. Regular movement outside of battle is handled freely, but while this could have just been the way to convey you from one battle to another, there is a strategic purpose to how you approach enemies. Once you have attacked an enemy or entered their range of sight things will turn into the battle sequence of characters taking turns to attack and move, but you can choose how the engagement begins.

This approach to starting a battle has a few things that work for it and others that aren’t quite as well polished as the game thinks they are. Getting to choose where you’re characters are standing at the start of the battle is an interesting mechanic. You can position them in multiple spots and have them pop out to flank enemies or split their forces, you can choose which of the enemies you wish to fight first and potentially take down before they can cause trouble, and you can begin the battle with something big like a grenade to break environmental cover or hit multiple enemies at once so you have a major advantage moving in. However, stealth is given a big emphasis in the game’s mechanics but it doesn’t really survive contact with battle. The game encourages you to try and pick off single foes to thin the enemy numbers undetected as well as giving you many skills that increase your abilities when you’re undetected, but the weapons that won’t make noise are few and far between and not even too strong. There are still some uses to the stealth skills when setting things up, but trying to attack from the shadows can be hard to pull off reliably because it’s often a much weaker and harder option. However, there are still ways to manage detection intelligently, such as making sure your noise only alerts a small chunk of the enemy forces instead of all of them. Fighting foes in small groups can make the battles more manageable, so pre-battle positioning can still have an interest strategic element to engage with. Fights can be very difficult, especially since you’ll almost always be up against foes similar in strength but greater in numbers, and depending on your difficulty, things can be made even harder. Medkits for healing are pretty rare and most often are best acquired by spending your limited scrap on them, but on Normal you’ll get full heals after battle. However, the higher difficulties will change it to a 50% recovery or no post-battle heal at all, as well as there being a mode where characters can die permanently, something that can be devastating considering the small amount of mutants you can recruit. Reviving a fallen ally is possible on all difficulties midbattle though so long as you’re quick to go to your fallen friend.

As for your actual abilities in combat, your mutants can pack two main weapons, both having functionally infinite ammo but needing to reload it if they use up its loaded ammunition. Power output and range are the main considerations when arming your battle crew of three, but modifications can be purchased to let them have extra effects like starting foes on fire, knocking them back, or disabling mechanical foes. Each mutant also has a few abilities they can call on in a fight, a few shared across the cast but the combination of them being unique to an individual. However, the effectiveness of these varies. Positioning abilities like the Moth Wings mutation used to ascend nearby high ground are so mechanically situational they’re hardly worth it, while something like Bormin’s ability to Rush and double his movement range on a turn are so useful its hard to justify using his other mutations. Most characters will have a few helpful ones and a series of duds so it balances out, but when leveling up you might have to learn the hard way which ones are truly useful. Leveling actually occurs pretty often after all but the smallest battles in this game, but that’s because it mostly serves as a way of giving you skill points for the skill tree. Your stat increases and abilities both require spending skill points, and Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden actually keeps its numbers pretty small in general. Even by the end of the game, you’ll tend to be doing damage in the teens against foes who might have health in the fifties, although armor can shave a few points off damage if its equipped. You can have armor too of course, and your armor can also eliminate concerns such as being set on fire or taking critical hits if it has that associated special trait.

Perhaps the most important thing about the core mechanics is that simplicity. The damage numbers are low so its easy to figure out how much you’ll need to hit an enemy to take them down. Perhaps more importantly, accuracy is also represented in pretty clear detail. Depending on your range and other factors like cover or character perks, the accuracy of an attack will only ever be represented as one of five accuracies: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, or 100%. On top of that, getting a critical hit tends to only make an attack deal a marginally greater amount of damage, meaning that you can reliably understand combat throughout most of the experience. If you’re shooting at a foe with a 50% chance of hitting, it’s understandable when it misses but a joy when it lucks out and you do hit. 75% is more reliable, but it still feels understandable when you miss, especially since positioning can so easily change the percentages in your favor. Minimized ambiguity favors more strategic play as risks are more calculated rather than a roll of the dice, but the enemies you face have a few varieties that aren’t very enjoyable to face. While many regular enemies make for good skirmishes, some foes pack the ability to completely immobilize a character for long periods or mind control them and turn them against you, and it is actually possible for your entire crew to end up unable to do anything if these combine poorly. That outcome is rare, but even having one character unable to do anything to help you can bog down the combat a bit.

THE VERDICT: Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden feels like the start of something great, but it doesn’t push its interesting ideas as far as they could go. The post-humanity world has some interesting details but its not fully touched on and the characters aren’t given too much room to grow, but both come together to make for a realized setting, just not an overly deep one. The combat has many systems going for it as well, such as unambiguous success rates and an emphasis on movement and positioning, but the stealth and certain abilities don’t feel fully realized at times. Overall, the battles still put up a good fight where strategy is key both before and during the fight, so while this game feels like it could have been more, it’s still done a lot to make what it offers enjoyable and diverse.

And so, I give Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden for Xbox One…

A GOOD verdict. Developers The Bearded Ladies Consulting certainly had a lot on their plate when it came to making this game. It’s their first large game and it’s adapting a relatively unknown Swedish tabletop game, meaning it had a lot to introduce and a lot of new challenges for the team. Perhaps this is why there are so many small stumbling points throughout, but the important emphasis is that they are small. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden has a few problems with enemy design and stealth mechanics, but most of these can be accounted for within the game’s mechanics which are an excellent foundation due to the clear communication of information and the openness for different approaches to battle. However, it’s a game aching to be more. The characters and setting are given enough to be interesting but don’t have the hard push needed to make them truly compelling, but they still carry the turn-based combat well. If the game had continued past the end a bit longer perhaps it could have been an even more satisfying package, but the game still manages to please, especially from a mostly solid gameplay standpoint.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is the kind of game that leaves you hungry for the sequel. What’s going on it works well for the most part, but the potential for more fully realizing the systems and story elements set down here makes the prospect of a future title quite tantalizing. The game does make for an enjoyable post-apocalyptic turn-based RPG, but it’s still the kind of game where afterwards a player is tempted to imagine what it could be if it had continued to refine its ideas.