Which brings me to the second big switch away from TBS norm. 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. (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). 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. 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. 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.

you sprint about the place until you blunder into an enemy, at which point the entire viewpoint switches into Battle Chess Mode. I don’t mean, by this, that it’s Final Fantasy – i.e.

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. 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.īut it twists in two profound ways. 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.

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. There are at least 99 ways this could have gone horribly wrong.

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