While the concept itself is welcome, Road to Eden’s exploration options lead to quite a few issues. This affects combat by allowing you to position your characters for the coming attack, and it affects the rest of the game by adding a loot and exploration element to the experience that we don’t typically see from these kinds of titles. Namely, Road to Eden allows you to freely roam the game’s world outside of battles. However, much like the brilliant Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, Road to Eden distinguishes itself from X-Com through a few key alterations to the formula. You take cover, fire shots that are tied to a hit percentage, cover your teammates, and ultimately try to clear an area of enemies before moving on.
Road to Eden’s gameplay resembles X-Com in many ways. It’s great that’s the case because the rest of the game is decidedly hit and miss. What keeps you glued to Road to Eden aren’t even the moment to moment story beats but rather the fun of existing in this universe. Within minutes, the game does an incredible job of making you fall in love with its initial cast of characters as well as understand the stakes of this strange world where the desperation of survival is cut with the absurdity of believing that a duck and a pig are among the world’s saviors or that an iPod is perceived to be some kind of fruit preserver.
True, some of the credit here goes to the Mutant Year Zero universe established by the tabletop series, but as someone who had no familiarity with that world prior to playing this game, I was shocked by how quickly I came to care about this world and the characters in it. That’s especially true of the incredibly inaccurate descriptions of old-world artifacts that feel genuine and effortlessly funny. I rarely ever bother to read every piece of lore in a game, but the many ways that Road to Eden builds its world through these little morsels of information is downright impressive. Actually, the game’s best storytelling moments often come through things like item descriptions and character quips. That all comes down to the way that developer The Bearded Ladies implemented so much personality into so many aspects of Road to Eden. Every character is paired with a voice actor that ranges from very good to exceptional, while the occasional animated and in-game cinematics and non-interactive sequences spread throughout the experience demonstrate production values that really highlight what the right team can do even when it’s not working with all the money and tools in the world. In fact, for a game that was seemingly made with a fairly modest budget, the quality of Road to Eden’s voice acting, presentation, and other cinematic elements are impressive.
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