Lack of player agency destroys all the amazing potential

User Rating: 4 | Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden XONE
All the other reviews, pics, and vids clearly show the amazing world, characters, and richness. It's wonderful. But what moat reviewers seem to have missed is that this entire game is the EXACT SAME *REQUIRED* combat technique from beginning to end. ...and it's a chore. 1. Crawl around the edges and trigger the patrol paths of every map. 2. Use the EXACT SAME THREE SILENT WEAPONS to pick off patrolling enemies. 3. Finally kick off a "full" attack (including finally using your powerful weapons and abilities with a tiny bit of flexibility and strategy. 4. Repeat this for the ENTIRE linear sequence of maps, except one mid/late game branch in the path, because all branches are level-gated until close to the end. This is a chore. It's not even a strategy game at this point, since there is exactly one strategy the devs see as viable. The game utterly wrecks itself, and all that lush, gorgeous potential is squandered by this self-sabotage of any true strategy. I finished the game, but WOW it was a huge bore long before the end. I often found myself missing X-COM and Wasteland 2 before the end.