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
‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review]
Hollywood has been stuck in a trend where a recognizable property — any recognizable property — holds more value than an original idea. This has led to a trend where a slew of acclaimed films have transitioned over to television and become limited series, because why not?
Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.
Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations.
This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.
On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.
Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.
It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film.
Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.
Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.
What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.
This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.
These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when.
Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.
Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.
If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.
The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.
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