Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden

From the advertising, I initially thought this was a post-apocalyptic tactical combat game, something like X-COM 2. This turned out to be completely false. The Road to Eden is a 1st person birds-eye-view stealth ambush game where you control a squad of up to 3 "stalkers" and do turn-based combat against enemies. I played and had fun for a good 10 hours or so before I got bored.

THE GOOD:

• Very atmospheric audio and video, combined with an in media res start, really sucked me into the game immediately! This is honestly one of the best starts I've ever seen in a computer RPG.
• The fighting is really cool, at first. It exploits concepts like high ground and cover. It allows you to choose your ground (to some extent) and take advantage of terrain to help you win.
• The artifact descriptions are amusing. The post-apocalypse survivors try to understand what the ancients used these artifacts for, sometimes with hilarious results. For example: the defibrilator, which they guess was used to help people lie down and relax.

THE BAD:

• Is it just me, or does hiding behind half-cover basically do nothing to protect you?
• Even on the easiest difficulty level, enemies have an absurdly high number of hit points. Your squad needs to go through its whole range of abilities to take out each enemy. The game loop involves stalking around an area, finding lone enemies, saving the game, spending 15 minutes using all your abilities to quietly take out one lone enemy (possibly loading multiple times until you get it right), then rinse and repeat. Once the only remaining enemies are bunched together and can't be taken out silently, you set up a good ambush and pray you can kill them all despite the fact that they are all massively more powerful than you. Failing to kill the lone enemies, failing to prioritize enemies that can summon more enemies, or getting spotted early, are all certain death. This makes for a very constrained game loop that feels very repetitive.
• When you're starting the game, the developer recommends you pick the hardest difficulty level. I have no idea how this game can be playable at that difficulty. It's a fighting game where you constantly fight to gain XP and get stronger. No fighting means no progress. On the hardest difficulty, they limit the amount of times you can use your special abilities ("mutations"), so you won't even be able to kill the lone enemies reliably. In addition, you don't heal from injuries without using a medkit and the game has a limited number of medkits. I've read accounts of people getting stuck halfway through the game with low HPs and no medkits remaining in the shop.
• It's off-putting for me to encounter a level 5 dog in one area that is fairly easy to fight, and then encounter another dog later that is suddenly level 45 and impossible. Why does one dog require 1 bullet to kill, but this other identical-looking dog can soak up 20 bullets?

THE UGLY:

• I was initially put off by the funny-looking duck and pig PCs, but they turned out to be ordinary people.
• Mutations: during character advancement you pick abilities as you go along. What's unclear is that you can only use 3 of them at a time (one from each category of major/minor/passive)! How does that even make sense? You've grown stronger tendons for jumping higher, but oh no all of a sudden when you want to scrunch down to take better advantage of low cover your tendons shrivel up?... and you can consciously transform your tendons back and forth whenever you want? OK
• The Elder's talking animation is incredibly disturbing.
• There are psychic powers, which is kind of dumb in an otherwise realistic-ish game.
• There's a railgun. You expect me to believe that it's possible to cobble together a weapon like that from post-apocalypse scrap metal, when we can't do that today with a functioning military-industrial complex? OK