XCOM meets RPG, another GamePass Winner

I'm a tactical game buff. My favorite series is XCOM, and this year I fell in love with Battletech. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden borrows a lot from XCOM (2016) and also introduces a stealth element to it's gameplay. You can single out and ambush individual enemies to thin the ranks before taking on the whole group, and in fact you have to or your team can become quickly overwhelmed.

I've played a few hours now, and I am really enjoying it. Some of the criticisms I have seen are that it is too hard, or that the RNG nature of it is not fun. I'm not sure what these reviewers were expecting since XCOM has the RNG "problem", but if it is really that bad, they allow you to save scum in this game. I think people are ignoring the stealth portion of this game and trying to just barrel into foes, instead of conducting reconnaissance then stealth killing the most dangerous enemies first.

This game was released directly into GamePass, so I didn't buy it and wouldn't have ever tried it probably, but I am glad I did. It isn't as good as XCOM, but the characters and story so far are interesting. I am aware that there is a board game...I think maybe when I was a kid I played it once or twice....but outside of knowing it exists I am not familiar with the universe of Mutant so I can't speak to how it lives up to that universe. I do find it funny, despite myself, when the characters say duck instead of f*&% in full view of the character Dux, who, you guessed it, is a Duck man like Howard the Duck. He hasn't commented on this yet, so I guess he is fine with it.

Anyone else check this game out? Thoughts?

I watched a Let's Play of the demo. It looks like a great game with a lot of smart improvements to the gameplay and UI. I'll be playing it for sure.

I didn't know it was on Game Pass though, thanks for that.

The game is quite good with the seamless exploration and combat feeling incredible. The combat is a bit simplified (ex. hit numbers are only in 25% increments), but the main focus of the game is exploration and stealth based combat. Now it is rather "short" at 10-15 hours and can be incredibly hard (ex. on very hard there is limited healing in the game so you can in theory reach impossible scenarios), but its overall quite enjoyable and feels like the future of X-Com style combat games (between the stealth and ability to explore / not just fight).

How's the performance on Xbox? I saw the dev play footage prior to release and the game's performance looked rough. There were xbox controller prompts, but I'm not sure if that was an Xbox or PC version they were playing.

Either way, the game looks really fun and I'll definitely be booting it up this weekend. Game Pass releases have really let me down this year (Forza Horizon 4 being the only exception), so I'm glad to see something I'm genuinely excited about to release via Game Pass.

I just played maybe 30-40 minutes and occasionally tried to make up my mind on whatever it was slowing down or not. I think it was generally fine, but when I rotated the camera, I felt like there was the occasional slowdown. I'm not the best judge in these things, because it sometimes takes a lot for me to register a game really choking up. It definitely didn't go over 30FPS and I'm playing on X.

Tech aside, this seems pretty fun! Controls well on a console, which was the thing I was most worried about before playing. Got a month of Game Pass for 1€, so can't really complain either way.

@big_denim: Seemed fine when I played it, didn't notice any issues at all.

@glots@lokihellfire2008 Good to know, thanks duders! Looking forward to playing it this weekend. The wife is away this weekend, so time to order some pizzas, pick up a six-pack, and yell angrily at a TV due to bad RNG rolls on >75% hits. :D

I decided to give this a shot since it was on Game Pass. I really like the style and atmosphere of the game, but holy cow am I bad at it. I haven't really played a lot of these types of games for anything past an hour or two. I started the game on the normal difficulty and died a couple of times just making my way to the first main quest in the game. Despite this however I was having fun and I think I might put more time in to it to get better.

Any word on how it runs on PS4 Pro? I want to play it on my TV, but if it runs like shit I'll just get it on PC.

@big_denim: they actually only do increments of 25% on shot chance, and when you are close it is a clean 100% chance to hit. No missing from inches away like some games in this genre lol

I've had a blast with it so far, gamepass user here. Have 5 party members to choose from at this point, about level 25 so im guessing halfway done, but this game has some real style. Gonna try to beat it over the weekend, anyone that doesn't have game pass needs to get it at this point, Forza 4, State of Decay, Mutant Year Zero, Sea of Thieves, all games id have bought, and id have paid the price of almost 2 years of game pass, and not get any of the other dozens of games from current all the way back to original xbox.

Tried it out thanks to this thread. Went with the default difficulty of "hard" and oh boy does this game not joke around. A lot of save scumming to be had at least on this first playthrough. The limited healing thing is really tough to adjust to and I've played the last couple of hours not being above half health on any of my characters at any given time

@musclerider: yeah, focus on exploring in the wrong direction, you can stealth into high level areas for scrap and gear, then pick guys off one by one if they wander from their groups (make sure everyone has a silenced option). Pig guy has a stun that doesn't break stealth, needs kills to reset though

Having some really excellent times with this on Xbox One X.

This game really surprised me it's really up my alley i can only recommend it even at 35 dollars or with gamepass which is way lower.

@musclerider: Yeah, I think I may have bitten off more than I could chew by playing on hard. Most enemies are nine levels above me and have 28 health, 2 armor versus my squishy guys that have only eight at most. Since hard DPS is tied to base weapon damage and the rest of the damage being elemental or crit chance I have no current recourse. I think I may have to load an earlier save at a lower difficulty other wise I'll just keep running into higher level enemies.

Not too far in myself but this game is fantastic so far. It's a shame it will be completely left out of the GOTY discussions.

I happened across this and downloaded it. I’ll play it sometime soon.

A new Jagged Alliance is also out (on the turn-based tactics front) and Ashen is on Gamepass. It was cool to see all this at once, tonight.

My wife bought me a year of game pass on sale as an early Christmas present so I’ve been playing this and really enjoying. I’m playing on normal (the easiest difficulty) and it’s still not easy. Then again the only strategy game I’ve ever really finished is Xcom enemy unknown so I’m not very experienced with the genre.

I signed up for game pass just for this and played until 2am last night. It's definitely got a "oof, I didn't expect it to get this hard this fast" thing going on, but once you learn what to expect it's not punishing. Assuming you don't mind a bit of save scumming. And a lot of duck jokes.

This has a dumb name and it looks like a Howard the Duck offshoot, but I'm really digging this as well. I'm still learning the mechanics, but it's got some innovations over XCOM that I like a lot, like the real-time stealthy approach, but I learned that enemies have eyes in the back of their heads and will crush you if you mess up your ambush.