Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden

2022-08-16

Perhaps it's no surprise that I didn't like this given I don't really enjoy the endless save-scumming required in XCOM but yep I bounced off of this almost immediately and then tried sticking it through for all of 2 hours. The problem, and this is called out by other reviewers on Steam, is the game really wants you to play a certain way. That way being to use stealth to pick off enemies with silenced weapons, slowly whittling groups of enemies down till you can fight them more fairly. The problem is this isn't actually fun. It's slow and tedious and error prone and leads to even more save-scumming. The second problem with this is if you don't do this then you end up in fights that are consistently WAY too hard. I played on the easiest difficulty, Normal, when they recommend Very Hard and I still was having my ass handed to me in every single fight after the first hour. I ended up sneaking past every encounter because after you spend two 10-20 minute bursts failing to fight the same group of enemies you get really burned out. Problem with that is now you're under-leveled for encounters that it seems like you have to participate in. Am I painting a picture of an unfair design? I hope so cause that's how it felt to me. I'm sure there's some type of strategy that you have to use, likely involving the afore-mentioned stealth "picking off" strategy, that works but why give me all these weapons and abilities and items and then say "Nah you gotta do it this one way." Sorry I haven't the time for this game.