Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

And I would've finished this game too if it wasn't made for middle-school kids!

 

Exactly what the world didn't need: a Tiny Toon version of the Zone.

 

Granted, given my soft spot for old-school titles like Heroes of Might and Magic, I'm not one to be deterred by a "cartoonish" visual aesthetic alone, but in this case (as is too often the case these days) the book's cover speaks true.

Speaking of cartoons, does everyone remember Scooby-Doo? The "mystery" show where the monster was always fake and the villain always turned out to be the last person you'd expect - <exactly> the last person you'd expect in a fake monster suit, unveiled with mathematical precision, every single time? Remember how proud you felt at nine years old "solving" a "new" "mystery" every week? Do you think giving snot-nosed little dimwits an undeserved feeling of accomplishment might've been part of Hanna-Barbera's marketing strategy? Well, that's Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden in a nutshell.

I'll admit its fanboy praise is not completely undeserved. Visually, the post-apocalyptic, overgrown industrial environments are scenic and laudably detailed, as are the fluid albeit overextended animations. I also found the combat mechanics impressively taut at first, fine-tuned to the point where (at least on the medium "hard" difficulty) you'll often find your damage output matches your enemies' health to the last point. However, while that's exciting for the first few levels, I rapidly began to wonder at everything thrown by the wayside in return.

Speaking of waysides, you'll be spending a lot of time there, not looking for specific objectives or exploring interesting spots, but mindlessly combing every single indeterminate square meter of terrain for "scrap" loot, your currency. While I approve of the scarcity of money, rare in cRPGs which tend to shower you with piles of cash and healing potions, pixel-hunting as a game mechanic should have been scuttled back in the '80s. The variety of loot you get is also unimpressive. 18 guns, 8-9 helms / armor the entire campaign result in sideways leveling: you get precisely the loot you need to remain on the edge of survivabilty at every turn, especially as the game world opens up one area at a time, usually with a loot-farming sidequest-zone attached.

Speaking of combing every patch of land, you'll also be forced to kill absolutely everything, as your character progression is based on kill EXP. Speaking of speaking, you won't be doing much of it, as by level 40 I've found almost no roleplaying choices. As far as storytelling goes, the trite old "we wrecked the world, boo-hoo" setup might as well compose a single paragraph of a Mad Max script, and the less said about the generic robots and brain mutants, the better. Neither is the inherent body horror / comedy of humanoid animal mutants ever given its due. There was potential there, but it just goes nowhere. Your character options are similarly limited, with five pre-made mooks to choose from to compose your three-man band for each encounter. Don't expect skill trees to be any more complex... or even tree-like at all. Your only choice is between linearly allocating active skills for utility or HP / DMG buffs as you go, and even there you'll find an inordinate amount of redundancy between your five characters. Level design might have been interesting, but ultimately boils down to the same routine, area by area. As seen in the screenshot, you circle around the map's outer edge alpha-striking adds with silent weapons to thin out the overabundant and redundant enemies, one by one by one by one by one by one by one, until inevitably reaching one fight per zone against a group of three or four which cannot be separated, which is where you'll be using up your medkits and grenades. Every. Single. Zone. For weapons you have a choice between silent direct-fire guns for ambushes or higher damage boomsticks and grenade spam for your one big fight per map.

OK, so this is a simpleminded, linear, combat-focused game with no strategic, roleplaying or economic depth. Did they at least build a multifaceted combat system?

No.

At first it seems great. Each of your characters can slot one particularly useful ability whose proper deployment allows you to overcome encounters which otherwise seem impossible on paper: entangling roots for dogs and other melee combatants, mind control for humanoids, a stun for mechanical enemies, a guaranteed crit or a knockdown for ambushes. Too bad you'll be relying on those same abilities every single fight, cycling through them constantly as they require kills to recharge.

Road to Eden makes a selling point, and is praised in user reviews, for its difficulty. However, difficulty, for a tactical RPG, implies the player must build up some sort of coherent framework and adapt to shifting challenges. Here instead your choices in party composition, character progression, path through the game world, items, skill usage, moral or stylistic impact, are either absent from the start or simplified into irrelevance. It's even less interesting than Fallout Tactics or similar titles which at least honestly admit their linear mission structure but offer breadth and depth of character / party / gear assembly.

It gives me the same impression I got from Battle Brothers: a dimwit's impression of a more interesting concept, a Scooby Doo mystery sold to an audience which must have heard of strategic / tactical cRPGs with gripping narratives and massive worlds to explore but don't want to put too much thought into one, and therefore settle for something charming but painfully shallow, finding one winning formula then endlessly repeating it mission after mission, pulling one rubber mask after another off the villain of the week and congratulating themselves on knowing the monster would turn out to be fake. By level 40-ish, 2/3 into the campaign, even spicing up fights by lobbing more grenades has worn thin. Even if one were feeling generous enough to excuse this repetitive little chore as a "children's game" it would only be an insult to min-maxing munchkins.

We're done here. Next trainwreck please.