Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden managed to catch my eye a long time ago when it was still in development. It isn’t every day you get some gritty post apocalyptic game with a human sized duck in it. If you follow this blog at all, you will know my obsession with post apocalyptic worlds in general. Mutant Year Zero is a good fit for me, so I was pretty excited to get my hands on it.
My first few hours of play time were not quite what I had expected. Sure, I got to play as the big ass duck but other than it being turn based, it wasn’t much like XCOM at all. The following image will summarize the first 2 or 3 hours of this game.
Yea, I died a LOT. An encounter with a shaman or a med bot was an instant loss for me. I felt like giving up and just moving onto a different game. I was not expecting this difficulty level to be so high. My guns were doing 3-4 damage per hit, I had about 8 health and no armor. I had to kill a group of 5 enemies who had 15+ health and were doing more damage than I could. The difficulty was nuts, or at least it seemed to be.
I decided to read up about it first. Maybe I was just playing the game wrong. Turns out I was! It is quite unusual for a game to force you to stick with a specific play style without at least giving you some signals. Turns out that stealth is the key. Watch the area, pick of enemies one by one rather than engaging in a big fight. Certainitely not how I played XCOM.
I am quite a way into the story now and the game has started to grow on me. The story is getting interesting and the world itself is pretty cool too. The mutant side of things is a huge change from the typical super mutant style enemies we get in games like this.
The gameplay has gotten very repetitive though. The same issues still exist with the balance between the damage and health that I have vs what the enemies have. I am hitting level 50 now and I still have under 10 health. The only way I can get through a fight without alerting every nearby enemy is to follow the exact same tactic every single time.
Hog rush to knock the enemy down for two turns and then proceed to chip away at the enemies health with a silenced weapon until it is dead. Rinse and repeat 5 or 6 times per area to clear all the enemies. There is nothing that can be done to alter this tactic as there are no alternatives. There is one play style and this is it. It isn’t killing the fun too much at the moment as I am genuinely enjoying the story. Will have to press on for now and see how the story wraps up.
