Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Review for PlayStation 4

Just like the human-mutant protagonists that star in it, developer The Bearded Ladies and publisher Funcom’s Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a hybrid that makes the most of its constituent elements. MYZ takes as its foundation the traditional turn-based tactical combat system found in seminal gaming franchises like X-COM and injects real-time stealth into it, allowing the two genres to meld into one cohesive entity. Although MYZ possesses a steep learning curve, its gameplay mechanics themselves are enough to make it such that any X-COM or stealth fan will not come to be disappointed with it.

MYZ is situated in a world that induces many questions yet gives few answers. The game begins in medias res, acquainting players with its two central characters, a duck-human named Dux and a bear-human named Bormin, as they scavenge for loot. The society has clearly broken down; airplanes have crashed, buildings are crumbling, and trees have begun to grow over all. Instead of outright explicating what caused such arrant destruction or how mutants came into existence, MYZ feeds players nuggets about the world through Dux and Bormin’s interactions as they progress toward achieving their objective. Even as it introduces to more mutants into the fray, MYZ smartly utilizes repartee to relay each protagonist’s personality.

Just like Ellie and Joel’s back-and-forth in Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us, Dux and Bormin’s drily humorous conversations make them likable characters. However, unlike Joel, Dux and Bormin possess almost as little knowledge about their world as players do. They don’t remember anything about the world from before society collapsed, they do not recall anything about their families, and they do not recollect how they mutated into their current forms. Their one goal, players learn, is to forage the wasteland that is the Zone for loot that they can take back to the Ark, humanity’s putative last reserve.

Once the two wend their way back to the Ark, the game commences in earnest. A man named Hammon has gone missing and the Elder, the Ark’s leader, commissions Dux and Bormin to find him. To do so, Dux and Bormin embark on an arduous peregrination through the aesthetically edifying, exquisitely detailed, and appropriately varied environments of the Zone. Despite the bland name of the world itself, the Zone is chock-full of items to pick up and enemies to take on. The world, portrayed from the top-down angle that X-COM fans will be accustomed to, is so beautiful that players will find themselves wanting to explore all the optional areas and tease out all the lore hidden in them.

Fighting adversaries in the Zone comes in two stages: real-time stealth and turn-based combat. When players enter any area, they manually control the members of their party (which can contain three mutants at any given time) and work their way across the map. Whenever they encounter an enemy along the way, players can position their characters such that they can ambush him.

Using silent weapons to take down an adversary in one turn prevents foes from alerting their comrades as to the attack being waged against them. Since even the weakest of foes packs quite a punch if they notice Bormin, Dux, or any of the other mutants snooping around, sedulously picking off lone enemies is the way to go. It is seriously fun to work your way through an area by figuring out adversaries’ walking routines, ambushing them when they stray too far from their groups, and silently taking them down before their accomplices notice. While it takes a while to get a hang of MYZ’s real-time, turn-based stealth, the developers at The Bearded Ladies implemented it such that it is extremely satisfying to partake of.

But there also come moments in the MYZ where a stealthy approach will just not work. Sometimes players will need to launch an all-out assault to defeat certain foes in order to advance the plot, or a few enemies will stay bunched together and thus be impervious to a purely stealthy approach. In these cases, enemies will alert everyone in the area to join in on the fight and converge upon Bormin, Dux, and their friends. Even while making use of the abilities that players can unlock once they level their characters up enough times, enemies can be extremely difficult to defeat (especially in the early going). The game’s easiest difficulty level still proves to be a challenge, and players will need to carry around as many medkits as possible when faced with an unavoidable fight.

To help Bormin, Dux, and the others along the way, MYZ allows players to restock and upgrade their characters’ gear at the Ark. Players can easily access the Ark from the Zone Map menu page, which allows them can fast travel to anywhere they have previously visited. They can exchange artifacts they find in the Zone for special abilities at Pripp’s Place, upgrade their weapons at Delta’s Fix Pit, and buy gear at Iridea’s Shop. Visiting the Ark to interact with these three merchants is essential, as players needs to take advantage of every perk they can get their hands on to have a chance of surviving the unapologetically difficult world of MYZ.

However, despite its alluring world and nuanced combat system, MYZ does not pace its story well at all. MYZ is prone to indulging in histrionic cut-scenes at key moments when advancing the plot. But more than that, the game feels as though it’s going nowhere fast until the very end, when all of a sudden it makes drastic leaps in terms of plot development. The ending is particularly frustrating – there’s almost no resolution, which makes MYZ feel more like a demo for a full game that will come in the future rather than a complete, standalone product.  

MYZ‘s gloomy ambiance and stealth elements really make the game worth playing. Although the storyline is not paced well and the turn-based combat itself feels a bit lacking in comparison to stealth, MYZ’s strengths really outweigh its weaknesses. The game delivers an experience worth diving into.

Rating: 8.5/10 

Check Out the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Trailer:

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is available for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC via Steam.

Jori Grossman

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I'm a recent graduate of Columbia University. Gaming has been a passion of mine my entire life; I enjoy everything from RPGs and FPSs to stealth and narrative-driven games. I love the deeply immersive quality that good video games inherently possess, and am looking forward to highlighting games worthy of acclaim. When I'm not studying or reading, you can catch me playing games like Uncharted, Dishonored, The Witcher 3, and Far Cry.

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