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.
It’s a big world out there, and that alone can make it seem pretty scary for some people. The uncertainty, the unknown, the unfamiliar – while there are those among us who crave exploration, they’re seemingly outnumbered by those who prefer to close their doors, their borders, and their hearts to whomever – and whatever – sits on the other side. The temptation will be strong to label The Outer Threat as a Temu Disclosure Day, but open your heart to it (and accept its budgetary limitations), and you’ll be rewarded with an engaging, hopeful genre tale.
Daniel (Mark O’Brien) is an astrophysicist living on a remote farm with Michelle (Constance Wu) and their two children (Callista Crowe, Isaac Smelcer-Zhang). He retreats every day to an underground bunker where he monitors and searches the universe for signs of extraterrestrial life, and one morning he finds just that – clear evidence of an advanced civilization that’s successfully found a way to harvest the power of their solar system’s sun. He’s understandably ecstatic and in a hurry to tell the world, but Michelle, a retired scientist who’s nearly given up on humanity as a whole and chooses to focus solely on her family, is adamant that he keep quiet.
He goes against her wishes, obviously, and sends an email filled with data attachments to his boss at NORAD. The result is almost immediate as electrical power, internet connections, and cell service all shut off in and around their small nearby town. Soon small drones are buzzing their farm and peeping in their windows, MQ-9 Reapers are bombing their bunker, and unmarked cars are following their every move.
Writer/director William Woods makes his directorial debut with The Outer Threat, and while his ambitions dwarf his resources, the end result is a compelling family adventure that argues for opening our metaphorical doors to the unknown. A strong cast, that also includes a supporting turn from the always welcome William Fichtner, helps carry the downtime between suspense sequences and minor set pieces. It’s an undeniably small film, but its ideas and conversations are exponentially bigger.
Michelle’s beef with humankind stems from both the personal and the general state of the world at large. Her father (Oscar Hsu) is also a scientist, and like Daniel, he risked valuing his work over his family to the point that Michelle no longer speaks with him. Her bigger issue is knowing that our species is a poor steward of both this planet and each other, and when Daniel accuses her of having little faith in humanity, she replies only “not without reason.”
One of The Outer Threat’s most interesting sequences will feel like a disjointed detour to some, but it actually encapsulates one of the film’s central themes in one simple exchange. The family is on the road and heading to Michelle’s father’s place – she’s not thrilled, but his past work with the government might come in handy – when they decide to stop for food. They reach a tiny town that looks deceptively abandoned and are welcomed into a diner by the owner, Sam (Fichtner), and his young granddaughter.
He’s initially cautious and explains that soldiers had passed through, telling everyone to remain indoors, but he proceeds to feed the family in need while explaining that he’s hoping to scrounge up some fuel to reconnect with the rest of his family. Sam also shares with Michelle that he hesitated to open his door to them simply because they were different. He was fearful, and now he’s ashamed and worried that maybe he’s not the man he thought he was. “What really scares me,” he adds, “was the thought that maybe, just maybe, we’re all rotten.”
She listens. She leaves. And she never tells him about the numerous extra canisters of gas they have in the back of their pickup truck.
It’s a striking character beat as our protagonist, even halfway through the film, remains steadfast in her disconnect from others. She’s far from the only one in need of change, though, as it was Daniel’s hubris and ego that led to this situation in the first place. “Our kids should be home safe,” she tells him at one point, “but you just had to let the world know how smart you are.” Woods and his cast mine drama from this brilliant but misaligned couple, and both Wu and O’Brien are convincing in their motivations and emotions.
Somewhat less convincing are the film’s occasional swings at big visual effects. Drones and weather balloons in the sky are passable, but explosions, vast encampments, and more land with an iffy digital thud. None of them are deal breakers, though, both because they’re used sparingly and because the characters and their dilemma take center stage.
Woods, whose best and brightest accomplishment remains serving as a producer on the criminally underseen 2020 film, The Kid Detective, arguably bites off a bit more than he can chew with The Outer Threat. His big ideas on both story and humankind are inevitably under-explored in a film of this size, and you’ll be left wishing he had a bigger budget behind him. Audiences are bound to expect something more from the film’s third act, especially, so set your expectations accordingly going in that this is more a film about human connection and ideals than it is a tale of alien invasion.
There are moments here of genuine suspense and thrills, but the film’s power rests in those human beats. From Sam revealing he was concealing a gun while making them pancakes, to Michelle’s father pushing aside huge news of world-altering significance so he can instead spend time with grandchildren he’s only just met, to feuding kids combining their skills for an act of bravery, this is a movie about people who can be so much more than we believe ourselves capable of being.
“For thousands of years human beings have been the dominant species on this planet,” says a character at a certain point, “but that’s no longer the case.” The trailer teases this line, and while you can’t fault the marketing department, it might feel like a bit of a bait and switch by the time the end credits roll. You can choose to be underwhelmed, but here’s hoping you open the door to the film’s hopefulness instead.
The Outer Threat is now available on VOD and Digital.
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