Your squad have/can unlock special abilities that enable you to regain control of a chaotic situation, but it's always seat of the pants stuff, shamelessly challenging and with tall demands on your patience and precision. 'Even more glorious is bungling an assassination, winding up in a thousand-degree frying pan as a result, and somehow surviving it. 'What a glorious thing it is to slowly, painstakingly, silently transform an area patrolled by half a dozen rock-hard baddies into one that's just got one or two suddenly highly vulnerable guys left standing,' Alec wrote. Mutant Year Zero switches between real-time and turn-based depending on whether we're in combat or not, so we'll sneak around, scout targets, set up ambushes, and, if you're me (which I think only applies to me?) try to salvage mistakes.

XCOM is an obvious comparison and inspiration for the game, but that misses the importance of stealth. I foolishly did not heed this, and only now there's a demo do I see oh god he's so right.

Our Alec gushed plenty of praise in his Mutant Year Zero review. Off we go out into the wastes of the Zone as a pair of Stalkers (yes, the terminology is familiar), pigman Bormin and duckfella Dux, to scavenge supplies and- no, look, we're the good scavengers, okay, not like those bad scavengers who are also just trying to survive. Mutant Year Zero's set a few centuries into the future, where the world is trashed by reasons long-since forgotten and civilisation clings on in one settlement surrounded by hordes of scavenging mutantmen. For folks who were already Stalking around the Zone, hey, a new challenge mode with leaderboards launched this week too. It's a bit XCOM-meets-S.T.A.L.K.E.R.-meets-Howard The Duck-meets-Hitman, and really quite a bit good. All and sundry are now invited to try out 2018's delightful tactics 'em up for free, sneaking and shooting through the post-apocalyptic wasteland full of mutants and oddities in the game's opening stages. If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, engages in turn-based tactical combat like a duck, and is free to look at like a duck, it must be a demo for Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden.

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