Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden wants to be XCOM but with ducks and pigs

An adventure in the wasteland with anthropomorphic animals

As I wrote about last year, making a turn-based tactical strategy game invites inevitable comparisons to XCOM. Most developers see it coming and plan accordingly. The next game from Funcom seems as if it’s happy to try to piggyback right out of the gate — no pun intended.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (which is a prohibitively long name) is described by Funcom and developer Bearded Ladies as “a tactical adventure game featuring a deep storyline set on a post-human Earth, which combines strategy and the turn-based tactical combat of XCOM with real-time exploration and stealth gameplay.” Also, two-thirds of the heroes are gruff anthropomorphic animals.

As we see in this cinematic reveal trailer, this mutated apocalyptic world has its share of oddities, most obvious being the pig and duck that star in this game. The duck is named Dux and he’s a crossbow-wielder; the pig is named Bormin and we just know that he has “serious anger issues.” Their goal is both ambitious and ambiguous: To find “the legendary Eden.”

The title Mutant Year Zero might seem familiar to some people. That’s because it’s already an established property, just not within the medium of video games. Mutant is a pen-and-paper role-playing series that has been around since the ’80s. The most recent campaign, called Mutant: Year Zero, released in 2014.

Little is currently known about what Mutant Year Zero actually is. The XCOM stuff is easy enough to wrap your head around, but the real-time exploration and stealth might add a unique wrinkle. Mutant Year Zero is said to release sometime in 2018 on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.