While it lasts, Mutant Year Zero is a tense, absorbing and atmospheric new member of the XCOM family. But it’s also very good at addressing things many strategy games falter at, always ensuring you have information to make good decisions and using clear hit rules. I could do an Iron Man permadeath-and-no-saves run and I started a Hard one, but still, it doesn’t fully deliver on its potential. Coupled with plenty of little launch-period bugs which sometimes made upper floors invisible and could get confused about where I could move my characters to, I felt Mutant Year Zero isn’t quite finished.

But in the 15 hours it took me to complete on Normal, I’d only just bought a couple of late-game skills and had barely used the other two characters I wanted a chance to explore them. I found the story, such as it is, fulfilling enough. The answer lay mostly in fussy fiddling with add-ons to raise critical limits and give chances of setting raiders on fire and EMP-stunning robots.Īnd then the game ends. Each demands different strategies, but by the mid-game most are introduced and I found the majority of the challenge came in figuring out how to eke more damage out of my weapons. There’s a good number of different types, from molotov-throwing pyros to telekinetic leaders, medi-bots to armoured tanks.

In fact, Mutant Year Zero too often leans on adding hit points to enemies to raise the stakes. Tooltips continually remind you how important this strategy is, but against higher level enemies you can’t deal enough silent damage to kill them in a single turn and everyone in the vicinity is alerted. I also found a lot of mileage in ambushing isolated stragglers, using quiet weapons such as the crossbow to take them out before they called for help on their first turn.

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