➤ Miasma Chronicles, the review of the new game from the authors of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden 🕹

The Bearded Ladies, the authors of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, return to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S with Miasma Chronicles and we have reviewed it.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden is a well-loved game. An experience certainly not perfect, but with enough charisma to push those who survived the first very hard hours of the campaign to love its protagonists and its epic. Even if they were an anthropomorphic wild boar and a duck, they were not beautiful to look at either.

As much as it is appreciated, Road to Eden has the Swedish studio for its developers The bearded ladies, a big flaw: it is based on the Mutant Year Zero board game license. However, it is a very strong imaginary, something that, according to them, has greatly limited their creative freedom.

Therefore, for their third effort, the bearded women decided to create their own universe from scratch and, thanks to the support of 505 Games, try to take all the glory.

In the Miasma Chronicles Review We will try to understand if the studio managed to achieve its goal and if a successful series can be born from this strategic role-playing game.

The Evolution of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

Miasma Chronicles, the review of the new game from the authors of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden — Miasma Chronicles' character designs are certainly original

Anyone who loved Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden will have no difficulty getting to grips with Miasma Chronicles' gameplay. In fact, it is once again a role-playing game that, during the fighting, becomes a turn-based strategy game in XCOM style.

The experience of the Swedish studio allowed him to carry out the amalgamation between the different elements is more cohesive and compact, to make the experience more fun and malleable, without the difficulty spikes of the debut game. This also allowed us to introduce some elements that could give even non-fans of the genre the opportunity to get closer to Miasma Chronicles.

This happens mainly by giving the possibility to first choose the difficulty, which goes from "Story" to "Alpha Editor", and later also what is called game mode. In this case you can choose between Light Tactics, which allows you to have a statistical reading of the combats less linked to chance or other elements (such as distance), and Complete Tactics, which will instead give you all the variables that El Barbudo Ladies has introduced. in its combat system. This range of options should allow anyone to find the challenge that best suits their needs, in addition to avoiding those bottlenecks that made the first hours of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden an insurmountable obstacle for many.

Two other elements that we really appreciate are the alternation between phase secrecy and the combat ones and the variables introduced for equipment. In fact, an important element of Miasma Chronicles is the preparation phase for the clash. During the search for his mother, Elvis and his friends will encounter several enemies that block their path and that will not be possible to avoid due to a linear map design, which makes use of so-called "gatekeepers" to prevent entry. rushed access. to parts of the advanced scenario. At that point there will be two alternatives: try to confront everyone head on (good luck) or try to reduce the enemy lines first. By sneaking up on them, characters with silenced weapons can attempt to eliminate their opponents without alerting their companions, perhaps taking advantage of flanking or surprise bonuses. Despite this, not all enemies can be eliminated in this way, unless you have a hyper-enhanced group of heroes, but this does not mean that it is not worth simplifying a battle in this way, also because one button is enough. to enter and exit stealth mode, something that allows you to reposition yourself quickly and intuitively.

Furthermore, as the hours go by, Elvis and his allies will acquire a whole series of weapons, accessories and truly extensive abilities that, combined with each individual's skill tree, are capable of greatly modifying the way they approach a battle. or use a certain character. For example, weapons can be upgraded or not. In addition, there are long-range ones, short-range ones, and others with bouncing projectiles. All this without counting the elvis arm powers, which add an additional layer of variables and effects that should not be underestimated.

The story of Miasma Chronicles

The growth of the power of Elvis's arms goes hand in hand with the maturation of the protagonist by Miasma Chronicles. The game, in fact, begins in the middle of the action with the young man, accompanied by his robot older brother Diggs, who tries to open a passage in the miasma to reach his mother. We do not hide the fact that the situation surprised us a little, but, also due to the fact that the child initially does many things that he knows nothing about, we will gradually begin to familiarize ourselves with the universe of the game. (a North America that ends up being the victim of yet another cataclysm) and with its protagonists.

in the afterlife 20 hours of campaign Then we will know why Elvis has a mechanized arm, why the world has been invaded by miasmas, why the protagonist's mother is at the center of all this, but above all what must be done to save the skin (even synthetic) of the different heroes. In this way, the story of Miasma Chronicles pushes the player to move forward and, mission after mission, to discover a well-drawn and also fascinating universe, despite a certain naivety in the plot and an originality that is not exactly worthy of an award. Nobel. for literature.

Cleaning issue

Despite the team's experience (we're on the third game, pretending Corruption 2029 doesn't exist), Miasma Chronicles has arrived on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series some defects that slightly affect the quality of the experience. We're not just talking about technical issues that can be resolved by the inevitable post-release updates, but rather some glitches that hide a little deeper in the experience. For example, the fact that companions teleport near the controlled character if he opens a chest or something else, thus nullifying his positioning, or the unintuitive controls for selecting objects or objectives, something that could be misleading.

The faces of the protagonists, then, are all quite expressionless and some dialogues and characters could have been developed with more care.

Moving on to combat, in some cases the enemies don't seem to behave in the most intelligent way possible, repositioning themselves when they could have easily attacked, while at other times they seem like relentless snipers, but in this case it could all be the result of bad luck. Nothing that affects the enjoyment of the game, but it does take it a little further away from excellence.

Conclusions

Tested version PC with Windows digital delivery Steam Price 49,99 € Holygamerz.com 8.0 Readers (13) 8.2 your vote

Miasma Chronicles is a good product, a solid and fun game that can keep you company for several hours. The game universe and story are interesting, although they lack the charisma of the world of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, but Elvis and Diggs' adventure will not fail to entertain fans of strategic role-playing games. A little more cleanliness in the interface and in the artificial intelligence and a little more brilliant writing would have allowed the 505 Games game to take that leap in quality that many fans of The Bearded Ladies expected. But we are sure that Swedish ladies will successfully continue their evolutionary path.