Mutant Year Zero Road to Eden Beginner's Tips

With all the hypetrains demolishing our wallets at the end of last year, you could have missed a pretty decent Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden developed by Swedish The Bearded Ladies. Next AAA-games wave is coming only in February, so we've got some time to play games that totally deserve attention. A tactical XCOM-like RPG inspired by board games, for example. So let's take a deeper look into all the main intricacies of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden to easily understand local mechanics and cope with genre specifics.  

Difficulty levels

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden has three difficulty levels: Normal, Hard and Very Hard. We recommend you to start with Normal one because even if you have got any tactical-games experience, some battles can set your head on fire. 

At Hard level enemies deliver more damage, once a stage is over your HP regenerates only till 50%, and skill cooldown time won't reset at all. Suits to all XCOM-pros who wants to feel the pain once more. 

Very Hard is not far away from the previous one, with the only difference in HP regeneration turned off — you'll have to use healing items. You better leave this Difficulty for a rerun and additionally activate Iron Mutant mode (similar to XCOM's Ironman mode), which blocks manual saving option to prevent players from reviving heroes. 

Well, you can switch Difficulties any time in the Menu. 

Mechanics

As we have already mentioned, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden very much reminds us of XCOM series. But of course, there are some differences we should note for ourselves. 

Your fighting squad can consist of only three heroes. At the very start, you only have two, by the way — Dux and Borwin. As you progress through — the list of available characters will expand. You can change your squad any time, but not in the battle. Try to choose your characters wisely, picking ones who suit certain circumstances, combine well and won't duplicate each other's abilities. 

World exploring is real-time, so you can always suddenly strike your opponent from the back and take battle advantage — just turn off your lights and nobody won't notice you. If the enemy has the initiative — they have turn initiative at the start. You can prevent any disadvantageous situation on paper, just be careful and make sure your squad cannot be spotted. 

Mutations, local active abilities, don't have familiar cooldowns during several combat phases, but instead, they recharge once you kill an enemy unit, so it is more profitable to keep weak opponents alive all along the battle. 

Locations in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden are pregenerated, so don't give up if you can't make it with the first attempt — all units and covers stay the same constantly. Next time it'll be a lot easier. 

Useful tips

• When healing your allies with active items, increase effectiveness with a Medic artifact. Bormin and Farrow have the ability to... eat their fallen enemies and gain health points. It is your choice whether to unlock and use it. 
• Silencers for firearms are very useful once you need to eliminate one or more enemies without attracting the attention of large groups. You can also use a crossbow to stay silent. 

• If one of your heroes is caught on fire having fallen into the range of the Molotov cocktail, immediately use a smoke grenade to choke the flames.
• Robots will appear among the opponents at a certain point and the tactics will slightly differ. Don't forget about EMP grenades and alternative skills (Circuit Breaker and Technophobe are perfect). 
• You can equip only 3 different abilities at a time. Feel free to change them as you wish but only while not in the battle, as well as putting on a more powerful piece of clothing. And don't forget to browse through the shop at the Ark! 

• Unfortunately, you can't sell trash and useless items. But at Delta's Fix Pit it is possible to disassemble unwanted loot into parts that are used for further upgrades. 
• Once unlocking Mind Control, use it only on mini-bosses and tenacious enemies. It will give you a huge tactical advantage for a few turns, since you can greatly decrease the number of opponents and lower health indicators of the controlled unit, after all, the former allies will also attack him in response. 

• Use manual saves (if no Iron Mutant mode intended). Do it immediately when visiting a new location, before the start of the battle and after its completion, as well as after each turn of your squad. You have access to several saving slots, which allows you not only to replay the whole battle from the beginning but to completely relaunch that pain-in-the-neck stage when everything went wrong. 

We hope this guide was helpful to you. If you have any questions, don't be shy to ask in the comments below!