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Turn-Based Tactics Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden - now with Seed of Evil expansion

BrotherJayne

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Joined
May 7, 2017
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13
Ugh, I might have to try stealthing the level 25 zone, cuz I'm getting my ass handed to me north and northwest

Edit: Welp, no go. Also checked someone's stream at the same place as I'm stuck, and they're fighting level 5's instead of level 10's

Dafuk
 
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Reinhardt

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xonTiRG.jpg
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Unwanted

Soulstones

Unwanted
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Dec 1, 2018
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78
I really hope they have great written character archetypes with these models, with some unexpected, interesting stuff.
But considering the fox is already a 'silent assassin', I guess I wont hope too much...
 

cvv

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Codex+ Now Streaming!
First of all, this game is an inclined, pure-blood RPG, what's it doing in Tactical?

And second it looks really good from the first 2 hours of gameplay I've seen.
 

cvv

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First of all, this game is an inclined, pure-blood RPG, what's it doing in Tactical?

From day one they've described it as a "tactical adventure game". See here as to why that may be: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...oming-december-4th.120609/page-5#post-5829739

The dev apparently thinks RPG equals being able to make your character into whatever you like, without any limitations. And because in Mutant there is a rulebook it's not an RPG?

Bah, just watch some Youtubes, it's an isometric, party-based RPG with a TB combat. (Unless there's some sort of strategy layer of base building later on that I haven't seen yet).
 

bylam

Funcom
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Oct 30, 2006
Messages
707
The dev apparently thinks RPG equals being able to make your character into whatever you like, without any limitations. And because in Mutant there is a rulebook it's not an RPG?

Bah, just watch some Youtubes, it's an isometric, party-based RPG with a TB combat. (Unless there's some sort of strategy layer of base building later on that I haven't seen yet).

I was just saying why I suspected marketing had chosen not to market it as an RPG. I've been on the Codex long enough to be completely confused about the definition.
 

PhantasmaNL

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PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria
Yeah tactical adventure seems about right. It is linear, with limited character development. Sure there are choices to make as to where to spend points but the choices are few and between meh and obviously the best. So i guess if you want to gimp your duck you can. Combat boils down to scouting the area with stealth enabled ('hidden'), taking out the obvious loner patrols and then confronting the rest. It can be pretty deadly otherwise. The combat has a distinct puzzle vibe. Tied to the limited character development choices are the limited combat options. The duck can fly, the pig can rush and run & gun (so can Selma). Loot consists of scrap and weapon parts which are currencies, and rare artifacts which you can trade for perks, such as a discount in the shop or an extended bleed out timer. Special weapons and armor are found in crates, which are also pretty rare. Enemies only drop one of the currencies. The base is a static screen which a few clickable locations (ala Starcrawlers). 6/10? The universe is promising though and the characters are OK.
 

Killzig

Cipher
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997
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Just about the same as I've experienced so far. You really want to stealth as much as possible because your weapons do fuck all for damage and once you get up a few levels most of the enemies turn into absolute bullet sponges.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/12/04/mutant-year-zero-review-pc/

Wot I Think - Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
Turn-based Stalker, with ducks


70


There are at least 99 ways this could have gone horribly wrong. XCOM-ish turn-based action in an apparently shameless borrow from STALKER’s setting, but starring a talking pig and duck? An overwhelmingly nihilistic tone, but also endless use of the ‘duck sounds a bit like another, naughtier word’ gag? Even the name, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, has that algorithmically-generated SEO jank vibe to it. And again: talking pig and duck.

Mutant Year Zero’s a gem.

XCOM’s an over-used go-to for talking about turn-based, cover-centric strategy combat, but it’s a matter of speaking to the thing the most folks recognise. In practice, Mutant Year Zero’s something else, even though it shares a couple of dozen concepts with XCOM et al – move and shoot or 2x move in a turn, bleeding out, recharging special attacks, high cover and low cover, percentage hit chances, all that jazz.

But it twists in two profound ways. The first is that it’s a fully real-time game until you enter combat – which, if you’re playing smartly, is almost always something triggered by you, as opposed to being caught off-guard by enemies. I don’t mean, by this, that it’s Final Fantasy – i.e. you sprint about the place until you blunder into an enemy, at which point the entire viewpoint switches into Battle Chess Mode. In Mutant Year Zero, it’s real-time until the first shot is fired – the real trick of the thing is how you set up the situation, in real-time, before that happens. Sneak your squad of miserable, mutant Stalkers into position, in cover, up high, clear lines of sight, primed for ambush, before you hit go: it’s more akin to setting up a play in whatever that ridiculous American sport with the big shoulderpads is.

mutant-year-zero-rps-review.jpg


You can just wade right in as soon as you spot some nearby baddies, in which case it’s a more traditional hard switch from real-time exploration to turn-time shooty-bangs, but this is invariably suicidal. (At least until fairly late in the game, by which point you can spec your team’s characters, weapons and skills to be more of an assault squad, but it’s still tough as old boots). Enemies are higher level and more numerous than your small, fragile squad of three – so quietly whittling away stragglers without alerting the rest of the pack is paramount. Which brings me to the second big switch away from TBS norm. Often (but not always) when such things incorporate stealth, you’re hidden until you’re not. Once a shot is fired, anyone nearby knows you’re there and you’re in for a full-on firefight.

In MYZ, taking out an enemy with silenced weapons, from a hiding place, doesn’t make their chums come running. This is easier said than done – fail to fell a lone foe in the first turn and they’ll yell for help, or resort to high-damage options such as assault rifles and grenades and everyone’s gonna know about it. You need to not pull the trigger unless you’re sure you can finish the job silently, in a single turn. It’s unfailingly difficult, because enemies almost always have more hitpoints than your silenced weapons have standard damage, but it’s such a thrill.

mutant-year-zero-pc.jpg


What a glorious thing it is to slowly, painstakingly, silently transform an area patrolled by half a dozen rock-hard baddies into one that’s just got one or two suddenly highly vulnerable guys left standing. Even more glorious is bungling an assassination, winding up in a thousand-degree frying pan as a result, and somehow surviving it. Your squad have/can unlock special abilities that enable you to regain control of a chaotic situation, but it’s always seat of the pants stuff, shamelessly challenging and with tall demands on your patience and precision. It’s the closest I’ve known a turn-based strategy game to feel like Dishonored or Hitman – making Mutant Year Zero a beautiful collision of gaming things I love.

Then it sweetens the deal further with overt Stalker vibes. Truth be told, my lip initially curled when terms such as ‘Zone’ and ‘Stalker’ were thrown around, with the exact same connotations – a post-disaster, post-human horror-wonderland and the grim-faced ‘mutants’ who scour it for ancient loot. I’m not familiar with the 80s, Swedish pen and paper RPG, Mutant, on which this is based, but, hey, Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky still spray-painted ‘exisential sci-fi dread’ all over that territory first.

(I came around to it, however, with a little mental gymnastics. MYZ is set several centuries after a terrible disaster, rather than a few decades, as in Stalker’s case. As such, I chose to interpret its mutant animal-men, and their total bemusement about the ancient human structures and devices they stumble across in this ruined world, as being the millennia-hence consequences of Stalker’s Zone somehow spreading to the rest of the world).

mutant-year-zero-base.jpg


At its best, MYZ pulls something else from STALKER. Understated, exposition-averse world-building, a sense of place built from the blurry, implication-heavy shape of Something Bad Happened, Sometime rather than its tedious cousin Here Is Exactly What Happened, When And Why. Partly this is the sparse writing, but mostly it’s the frequently astounding environmental art – devastation turned to green, wildness reclaiming a shattered human world of concrete and metal. Sure, The Last Of Us set this pace somewhat, but MYZ feels like its own beast – plus the pulled-out camera offers a new sense of scale, especially when MYZ is presenting ancient, crashed helicopters or the gutted, vine-woven frame of a multi-storey school.

Beauty abounds in the darkness of this Zone. The birds that scatter skywards as you walk, fingers of spectral light between lush trees, a shocking glimpse of snow… A combination of artists artisting and the Unreal engine Unrealing has achieved wonderful things here. My other turn-based joint this past week has been BattleTech Flashpoint, a stoic robo-war I enjoy greatly, but whose muddy palette, flat lighting and featureless landscapes now seem wholly without verve compared to MYZ’s glowing collision of light and night.

mutant-year-zero-road-to-eden-review-pc.jpg


All that lightly-sketched tone and all that quiet detail serve to mask an essential smallness to Mutant Year Zero. Aside from a few optional diversions into rock-hard bonus areas, you’re railroaded down a fixed track, the sense of DIY coming from how you setup and/or survive a fight and not from where you go. Though you can revisit anywhere, once an area is exhausted of its dozen-odd enemies and smattering of loot (used for crafting very low-key weapon upgrades), that’s it.

Weapons, abilities, squad members and enemy types are almost startlingly few in number, should you sit down to count them. Combat variety is more to do with where and when you bungle your play than any inherent difference in a given a scenario. The steel’n’neon base you sporadically return to for resupplies and upgrades is effectively three static scenes, while the slight plot is advanced almost exclusively through otherwise uncharacteristically over-written dialogue from one immobile character.

Only the latter, because it’s one of very few aspects of MYZ that waste my time, bothered me in practice. Doing a lot with not a lot is, for my money, the single most impressive thing any game can do (particularly in this age of unbounded bloat from the biggest-budget titles). I’m so captivated by how this has me journey through a haunting otherworld in ways that border on an isometric walking simulator and then sets a taut, stealth-centric turn-based battlegame within it.

mutant-year-zero-road-to-eden-review.jpg


Gluttonously, I would like there to be more of it, in terms of having a wide choice of places to go or order to see them in. It’s clear, however, that this has been done not from corner-cutting but to retain tight control over difficulty. If I could grind and loot away until my characters become super-gods, MYZ would lose something entirely vital to it – every single fight is frightening. The risk of being spotted too early, the certainty that more than one enemy can overwhelm my squad if they attack at once, forever riding the line between getting close (all the better for hit-percentage odds) and being seen or heard.

I’ve deliberately saved for last all discussion of Mutant Year Zero’s outlandish posterboys, its bipedal, talking duck and pig Stalkers. Outwardly, they suggest a game playing mutation for laughs – as though Howard the Duck and a Ninja Turtles baddie went on a rambling holiday together. MYZ’s final killer trick is that its animal characters (there’s a fox-woman and someone slightly lizardy later too) almost immediately stop seeming absurd, and instead become as sad and broken as everything else in this desperate, ruined world. They don’t know why they look like a pig and duck, they don’t think it’s funny that they look like a pig and a duck, and for much of the game they don’t know if there any other animal-themed mutants (most every other type they’ve seen is a variant of the bandit-like ‘ghouls’ who roam the Zone).

mutant-year-zero-review.jpg


Granted, MYZ takes a short while to find its tonal feet, and starts off making a few too many ‘duck sounds like fuck’ gags in the first hour, but the chaps’ loneliness and self-loathing soon overrides that. I will say that that MYZ’s usually sparse dialogue and aversion to cutscenes means there’s almost no space for character to emerge – and later additions to your team are almost entirely defined by their combat roles, not their personalities – and with that I cared only about my own progress, not their goals. (There are, however, some Very Good Hats). It could stand to be far meatier that front, but I’d much rather have it this way than suffer a didactic torrent of cinematics and explication.

Again, I’m greedy. I want a bigger, beefier, more flexible Mutant Year Zero. But that’s because the small, linear but smart, powerful and atmospheric Mutant Year Zero I got grabbed hold of me so completely.
 

Belegarsson

Think about hairy dwarfs all the time ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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Oct 20, 2015
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Uwotopia
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
13 hours in and I can tell that some codexers won't like it. It doesn't particularly struck me as a deep/complex game or one with huge combat experiment potential and replayability. It's strictly a linear narrative driven game where you can occasional stray off the guided path to fight optional enemies, that's it. Each character has around 10 skills in which only 2 or 3 are active skills, exploration is simply walking through every foggy corner on the map and spam pick up button; gears are... okay, for some reasons I've gotten like 4-5 helmets that make character immune to crit, but most of the weapons are quite unique with different stat defining their role, weapon upgrades are just slapping optic/laser and module to give it effects like increased crits/knockback/destroy cover and stuffs. Hit chances are 25%, 50%, 75% and 100%, nothing else. Combat loop is... well, not that far from nu-XCOM but with no melee and less reliant on overwatch, but I think this game handles pod activation quite better as you can go loud with a group and a nearby group won't be triggered as long as an enemy you engage won't call for that nearby group. There's not much to do at the hub from occasionally going back to restock and upgrade weapons, and the level system is... let's just say they don't really reflect how difficult your fight will be against a pack.

... but honestly I dig it a lot. It's simple but challenging at the same time, the transition between real time exploration and turn based combat is criminally smooth, and if you can exploit how AI and their vision work in this game (for example you can spam crouch button to walk around them faster because the ring vision takes a bit to reach your character) then you can have some really fun set up for a lot of fights. My biggest problems with it is I feel like my party is gimped because of 3 members limitation, and there are a severely lack of essential skills like med pack heals party member more in combat (especially when there's only three healing methods in this game, one requires you to be in combat and one is just... die so when the fight ends, character stands up with 4hp).

Also it's pretty amusing to listen to the pig and duck duo's comments on state of the earth because it's basically a new world to them. My favourite one would be the duck claiming a boom box to be some kind of dangerous explosive device because... well, it's called boom box.
 
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Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/mutant-year-zero-road-to-eden-review/

MUTANT YEAR ZERO: ROAD TO EDEN REVIEW

Let’s get it out of the way. Yes, that’s an anthropomorphic pig and a duck, and yes, you can play as a fox, too. Ha! But you’ll forget their inherent ridiculousness as you start to explore Mutant Year Zero’s skeleton-strewn Sweden and face its stern tactics challenge. Very quickly Bormin was simply my gruff stalwart tank, Dux my sharp-eyed, crit-dealing sniper, and Farrow my sneaking shotgunner. God, I love that gang.

Mutant Year Zero has a great blend of sardonic humour, grim detail and cartoon excess, a balance inherited from its venerable pen-and-paper RPG source, Mutant. Or, more specifically, its 2014 update, in which players take the role of mutant Stalkers wandering The Zone years after an environmental catastrophe, plague and a nuclear war has hit.

So yes, let’s get the other thing out of the way: the setting is third-hand STALKER. But again I forgot it as I got to grips with Mutant Year Zero’s meeting of realtime exploration and turn-based strategy. Here’s the idea: the world is divided into lots of discrete but connected areas as you set out to find a member of your settlement, The Ark, who’s gone missing. You’ll encounter enemy encampments, weapon chests, and caches of scrap and weapon parts, which act as currency to buy gear and upgrade your weapons back at the Ark, to which you can quick-travel.

This setup gives the world a coherence that’s lacking in most turn-based strategies, and I also like its persistence: once cleared, areas remain safe. But it also means that between fights you must ponderously run through undergrowth in search of the scrap you’ll need to afford vital medikits and grenades. The environmental detail often repays the time spent exploring, in abandoned campsites and discovering a skeleton propped up at a bar, but I wished movement is faster so I could more quickly get to the tactics meat of the game.

Mutant Year Zero’s key addition to the XCOM format is a new take on stealth. And it makes a huge difference. Combat starts either when you purposefully initiate it or if you blunder into an enemy’s awareness radius, which you can make smaller by crouching. This presents an opportunity to twist the encounter to your advantage by scouting the area to find vantage points, and it gives a fantastic sense of involvement in the ensuing fight, because so much results from the situation you set yourself.

Take one encounter I fought in a city. I found Dux could get into a building and take a position upstairs with a great view of the street, while below Bormin and Farrow acted as bait for raiders who streamed out of their base and into Dux’s rifle sights, each shot bolstered by the accuracy and critical bonuses he got from having a height advantage.

Bormin, meanwhile, used his Stone Skin mutation, or skill, to shrug off incoming damage and Farrow used Sneak to get around the flanks and Silent Assassin to raise her critical chance. Each character’s skill tree pushes it into certain specialisms, and some skills are wonderfully baroque: Moth Wings allows Dux and Farrow to sprout wings and take flight for the duration of their shot, giving better lines of fire, while Selma’s Tree Hugger can root enemies to the spot.

I also found a lot of mileage in ambushing isolated stragglers, using quiet weapons such as the crossbow to take them out before they called for help on their first turn. Well, initially anyway. Tooltips continually remind you how important this strategy is, but against higher level enemies you can’t deal enough silent damage to kill them in a single turn and everyone in the vicinity is alerted.

In fact, Mutant Year Zero too often leans on adding hit points to enemies to raise the stakes. There’s a good number of different types, from molotov-throwing pyros to telekinetic leaders, medi-bots to armoured tanks. Each demands different strategies, but by the mid-game most are introduced and I found the majority of the challenge came in figuring out how to eke more damage out of my weapons. The answer lay mostly in fussy fiddling with add-ons to raise critical limits and give chances of setting raiders on fire and EMP-stunning robots.

And then the game ends. I found the story, such as it is, fulfilling enough. But in the 15 hours it took me to complete on Normal, I’d only just bought a couple of late-game skills and had barely used the other two characters; I wanted a chance to explore them. Coupled with plenty of little launch-period bugs which sometimes made upper floors invisible and could get confused about where I could move my characters to, I felt Mutant Year Zero isn’t quite finished.

I could do an Iron Man permadeath-and-no-saves run and I started a Hard one, but still, it doesn’t fully deliver on its potential. But it’s also very good at addressing things many strategy games falter at, always ensuring you have information to make good decisions and using clear hit rules. While it lasts, Mutant Year Zero is a tense, absorbing and atmospheric new member of the XCOM family. I suppose wanting more of it is a good problem to have.

THE VERDICT
81

MUTANT YEAR ZERO: ROAD TO EDEN
Its mix of tense tactics and realtime exploration gets much right, but Mutant Year Zero doesn’t feel quite finished.
 

Saduj

Arcane
Joined
Aug 26, 2012
Messages
2,547
Anyone encountering bugs? Trying to decide whether to buy this or Mechanicus next. In an upset, this one is winning due to Mechanicus being reported as ridiculously easy.
 

PhantasmaNL

Arcane
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Joined
Nov 20, 2012
Messages
1,653
PC RPG Website of the Year, 2015 Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 BattleTech Bubbles In Memoria
Wait for the Mechanicus balance patch.
Get Mechanicus.
The end.
 

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