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.