Miasma Chronicles review – Disappointing follow-up to tactical gem

A useful tactical game falters with a bland setting and narrative, beaten down by stubborn stereotypes.

Licensed video games are fun. Sometimes a license elevates a game to make it better than it would otherwise be. For example, I love Respawn’s Jedi games, but I doubt I’d feel the same way if they weren’t set in a beloved galaxy far, far away. In other cases, it may be too restrictive, discouraging developers from trying to work within or around the constraints of existing settings. I enjoyed the Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden I played, and the covert tactics of the bearded lady are based on an old TTRPG, so I’m excited to take a look at the follow-up Miasma Chronicles and see what it can do with a new world What. Sadly, the Mutant Year Zero license seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting, as Miasma Chronicles doesn’t have a fraction of the game’s charm, while featuring some very questionable characters.

The basic elements remain the same, and they do provide a pretty solid foundation. Like its predecessor, Miasma Chronicles is essentially a turn-based tactics game that borrows many conventions from XCOM. Mutant Year Zero’s change to the formula is that this core is put into a real-time frame that sees your team wandering through game levels and getting into the sweet spot before the battle begins. Miasma Chronicles expands on this, allowing you to sneakily execute as many enemies as you want, rather than a single kill. This is a good idea in theory, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. Stealth bits are well executed, and important information is clearly marked, such as enemy line of sight and whether comrades are close enough to notice that they’ve been killed, even with suppressed weapons. I love the stealthiness of this puzzle-like game, and it’s quite satisfying to take out three-quarters of the squad before they even know you’re there.

It disappoints me that maxing out your stealth kills before every fight isn’t an option, it’s a necessity. If you don’t massively reduce the number of enemies and prepare your team for a favorable alpha attack, you’ll be overwhelmed very quickly, even on standard difficulty. Make a mistake halfway through your plan and you could narrowly win with your limited resources at a huge cost, or you might as well reload your save and try again. Thanks to some generous autosaves, it’s not as frustrating as it could be, but I’d much rather be free to make mistakes and enjoy the chaos that ensues. As it stands, it makes the whole process tedious and tedious.

When it comes to crunchy round bits, I’d say they’re good. All is well, it’s just a format that has become all too familiar. See, the Transformers Cyberverse kids cartoon had an XCOM-like matchmaking game a few years ago. That’s where you need to do something new with the formula, or really stand out, and Miasma Chronicles has neither. My main problem is that this is an extremely crude game. Consumables are limited, not even glass bottles (apparently the only post-apocalyptic item that’s good enough to distract guards). Ability cooldowns are so long that even basic abilities like Overwatch have to wait three turns between uses. The protagonist Elvis Presley’s ability to remove armor? Six-turn cooldown, so don’t expect to use it more than once per fight. To make matters worse, the cooldown persists through skirmishes, so if you use an ability at the end of a fight, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to use it at all in the next fight.

It doesn’t help that new skills are released too slowly. Each character earns one point per level, which happens approximately every hour. Most skills cost two to three points, and some are even more expensive. While there are other sources of new abilities for certain characters, such as Elvis’ gauntlet-based miasma power, for most of the game, you’re just moving and shooting, reloading occasionally.

There are enough enemies to keep things interesting, though some of their powers will make more precise tacticians gnash their teeth in frustration, and teleportation and summoning are a factor. When you carefully cleared an area before a fight, only to have the survivors bring four replacements on the first turn, you might feel a little irritated about the aforementioned pearly white. As I said, that’s fine, it would be good enough if the framework around it was better.

Unfortunately, this is where Miasma Chronicles completely fails. At best, it’s uninspired. It’s the same post-apocalyptic scene we’ve seen a dozen times before, all doom and gloom and misery, with an overused palette of grays and browns and people not cleaning the houses they’ve been living in for decades. Sure, some details have changed, and the tech overlords and mutant monsters have different names, but nothing new. The cast of characters is a huge step back from Mutant Year Zero. A big part of the game’s appeal is that your main duo are ducks and pigs. It’s funny until you realize it’s not a joke, being a mutant kind of sucks, and you really start to develop feelings for these characters.

Miasma Chronicles, on the other hand, has a boy and his robot. Elvis is an ordinary person’s choice, so ordinary that they forget to give him a personality, he always sounds boring, sleepy, or both. Diggs, his robot “brother,” was an outdated ’90s movie stereotype of a snooty black man that was tiresome even at the time. Would it surprise you to learn that Jade was the first and most prominent character to move into the third spot on the team? She’s a mysterious, brusque badass when she drops a bad guy?

For the most part, they’re just lame characters, but Diggs are a real problem. He is a modified mining robot that has been upgraded to protector by Elvis’ mother. He’s strong and tough, but not too bright. One of his core abilities is that he can act as a moving cover for other characters, which is an interesting addition, but contextually affected. At one point he mentioned bling. There’s some casual dialogue where a townsman tells him he should go back to work (in the mines, like all the other good little Slavs… I mean robots.) The mayor tells him straight up that he wants to Speaking to the equipped brain, referring to Elvis Presley.

He’s created the most racist stereotype of a video game character I’ve come across in years, and it’s simply unacceptable. A black character who is stronger but not as smart as his white counterpart is raised from the slave class to take a bullet for a white savior who constantly flatters and praises him without taking credit for the heroics he is equally responsible for . It’s enough to condemn a great game, it damns the game completely.

There’s also a throwaway phobic line in the diary entry about the writer not caring about whether the drugs cause them to grow boobs, which made me visibly uncomfortable. It’s completely unexpected and doesn’t even help establish a particularly annoying character. An unpleasant moment, though it pales in comparison to the anti-Black racism on display.

Without Diggs, Miasma Chronicles is okay, useful, mediocre. A tactical game to play if you have no other options and can pick it up cheaply. It’s not worth your time to be with him.