Reviews
[Review] ‘Mutant Year Zero Seed of Evil’ DLC Brings a Fire-Breathing Moose and Body Snatchers to its Turn-Based Strategy
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden was one of the biggest surprises to me last year. The game adapted a tabletop RPG with tired post-apocalyptic setting by populating itself with strange animal-human hybrids that were interesting both in design and attitude. Developers Bearded Ladies Consulting also added elements to the turn-based strategy genre, one of my favorite genres, that I had never seen before. While the fun characters were never really given a plot worthy of their charms, it ended up being a flawed, but incredibly smart evolution of the genre.
What made Mutant Year Zero stand out was its mix of turn-based strategy and real-time stealth. So many strategy games give you a fairly static starting position, but MYZ allowed you to sneak across the battlefield in real-time, set your characters up in cover positions and start the battle on your own terms. It’s a rewarding mechanic that forces you to invest yourself more in the world around you to figure out the best angles for ambushing your enemies. Nothing is more satisfying than quietly surrounding an unsuspecting enemy and taking them out in one round without letting them get a shot off.
So what does the new DLC Seed of Evil add to the game? Right off the bat, it’s clear that Seed of Evil is happy being more of the same. The DLC is end game content for those who have finished the game, initially appearing to be a continuation of the story presented in the main game, but quickly takes a turn into its own self-contained side-story which takes place in a handful of new areas. I’d much rather they save a followup to the Road to Eden storyline for a full sequel, so another slightly meaningless adventure works for me. The central mystery involves mysterious vines overtaking the Zone that show up alongside Invasion of the Body Snatchers style pod creatures replacing people all over. The aesthetic of the threat does a good job of doubling down on the post-apocalyptic decay that made the base game’s areas pop.
To go along with the new areas, you have an entirely new mutant added to your party early on. Big Khan is a giant, fire-breathing moose that packs just as much personality as the other characters. I kept him in my three-person party throughout the entire DLC, not just because he was new, but because he managed to be useful. His default pool of health is higher than most of the other characters, making him a valuable asset in some of the longer duration fights. Healing items are a luxury in the world of Mutant Year Zero, so every extra hit points counts.
Seed of Evil throws in a couple of new wrinkles when it comes to enemy encounters. Some powers that your characters have are now available to your opponents, forcing you to prioritize certain units the battlefield. Occasionally you’ll even run across spawners that will continue to spit out enemies until you destroy them, giving you interesting decisions to make about where to focus your efforts during a firefight.
Despite these changes, combat is largely unchanged from the base game. Because this is end game content, the enemies are higher level, making it harder to be able to deal enough damage with your silenced, weaker weapons to isolate and covertly eliminate stragglers. Being able to manage the battlefield with stealthy ambushes was one of my favorite elements, so taking that away reduced my enjoyment a bit while also making battles feel a bit more overwhelming and harder to manage.
One of the less satisfying choices that the game makes is with the level up system for the original characters. Even though they continue to level up, they are not given new abilities, but rather can upgrade some of their existing ones. These can be nice, particularly one character’s ability upgrade from ‘freeze enemies in place’ to ‘turn enemies into cover,’ but it doesn’t feel like these abilities keep up with the power curve of the higher level enemies, who mainly have larger health pool.
In order to reuse some of the levels from the base game, the DLC will give you a few new “quests” in old areas on the map. These end up just being challenging combat encounters that yields special new weapons rather than any new story content. While some of these weapons are rather useful, including one that will automatically stun robotic enemies, these side missions end up feeling tacked on to add content to a fairly short piece of DLC. They pop up seemingly randomly between missions, and there’s nothing that signifies they are complete aside from the icon disappearing on the map.
Several things that frustrated me in the base game are not addressed in Seed of Evil. I still question the inclusion of permadeath in a game where you have such a small in-mission squad and such a small pool of characters to choose from. Since you still only heal to half health after a battle on the default difficulty setting, I feel like they could have added more abilities to give players options to heal their units without using precious health packs. I understand the game is meant to be challenging, but it caused me to frequently save and load in order to get through battles without losing characters.
As with most DLCs, the question ends up being “who is this for?” Will Seed of Evil be the kind of expansion that draws new players to Mutant Year Zero as a whole? Probably not. It still has the same flaws of the original game and seems content with making no attempt to remedy them. Will Seed of Evil satisfy players who enjoyed Mutant Year Zero‘s clever mix of stealth gameplay and turn-based combat? Absolutely. As long as you go in not expecting a richer take on storytelling or a game-changing mechanical wrinkle, you’ll have a great time with the additional encounters and environments of Seed of Evil. Hopefully, developer Bearded Ladies Consulting finds success with this franchise and has some innovative ideas for a sequel to push their clever revisions to the genre to the next level.
Mutant Year Zero Seed of Evil review code provided by the publisher.
Mutant Year Zero: Seed of Evil is available now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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