Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Preview

Funcom and The Bearded Ladies’ upcoming post-apocalyptic mix of tactics and RPG, Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, is going to share quite a few surface-level similarities with Firaxis’ XCOM titles, and because of that, this Rock, Paper, Shotgun preview is structured in a fairly unique way to highlight the differences between the two. An excerpt:

FIND: Stand alone, self contained missions.
REPLACE: Open exploration in a post-human world where the characters think a boom box is a weapon of some kind, because of the name.

FIND: Near-as-dammit current day setting; humanity scrambling to deal with invasion from a more advanced alien society.
REPLACE: Fun post-human society set dressing – hundreds of years after we’ve gone, there are crumbling highways, rusted out ambulances, the remains of a playground.

FIND: Returning to the XCOM base between missions, to allow your troops to heal and resupply.
REPLACE: No rest for the wicked. Looting to find useful things, like medkits, or keys to locked doors from earlier in the level.

[…]

FIND: Different loadouts for different soldiers selected on deployment.
REPLACE: Finding new weapons as you go. Switching between silent and loud guns as the situation demands.

FIND: Turn based movement for squad and enemies the whole time.
REPLACE: Use of stealth and ambushing in open world free-roaming, to pick off patrolling baddies without initiating combat. Repeatedly failing at this and alerting many enemies in the area.

FIND: Those horrible snake aliens.
REPLACE: A kid of mutant wizard electrocuting everyone.

FIND: Drone support unit.
REPLACE: A heavily shielded robot that can heal dead enemies, godammit.

FIND: Alien psychic powers.
REPLACE: Duck bills.