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Spoiler-free review. Follow for more at my curator, Elysian Reviews I also write with a team of reviewers at IndieGems.

Introduction:

I loved the original Road 96 and reviewed it very positively. It told a beautifully poignant tale of a desperate bid for freedom, showing the complexities of human character and nature of endurance through a series of scenes and side-characters that felt raw and believable. Mile 0, by contrast, is its foil. Except for the last scene, it’s shallow, with soulless writing, and vacuous characters – an absurd and immature cartoon that arrogantly and undeservedly dares to bear the title of its grand and heartfelt predecessor, and sinks in stark inferiority to its former title’s lofty heights.

Performance:

• GeForce GTX 1660Ti
• 8GB DDR4@1330MHz
• i5 9300H @2.4GHz
• HDD 7200RPM
At 1080p, Mile 0 ran well over 100FPS constantly. I experienced no bugs or glitches, which makes this one of the only positive things I can say for the game.

Gameplay:

Mile 0 plays a lot like Road 96, and other similar games like Life is Strange. There are small sets you can explore, though they are often linear and lead to cutscenes and dialogue choices that drive the narrative. And that’s fine – games like this are a vessel for a story, and it is the story you play them for. I wouldn’t have minded if this was it, but for reasons unbeknownst to me, they added a minigame to Mile 0 that sadly constitutes about half of the entire game time.
It is essentially Subway Surfers – a mobile game – you are jumping over, or ducking under obstacles collecting combos and points in what is meant to be a skating session with the game’s protagonists. I didn’t dislike this. I hated it. It was tacky and cheap. The achievements are nearly all tied to them so to 100% the game you have to perform well in each which as a completionist frankly sucks. And bafflingly some of the story is told from within this via some dialogue, yet they’re unwanted filler content: unrealistic and absurd, and littered with stupid quick-time events.
Mile 0 doesn’t know what it wants to be, and it ends up being rubbish. On the one hand it’s an arcade mobile game making a lousy attempt to be trendy, but on the other hand it’s the prequel to a deep and contemplative narrative game set against the backdrop of a political dystopia that isn’t clever enough to make you think, and never puts you in a position where you really have to, unlike the first game.
Mile 0 ends up being worse than the dystopia it wants to portray, and makes a mockery of the severity of its own setting. It is immature in all its facets and lost my favour very quickly because of this. The final act, though better, was not enough to constitute a redemption.

Story:

Writing:
Mile 0 strikes me as written by a naïve teenager. It screams mediocrity so loud it’s painful, as we’re forced to endure the asinine dialogue between two characters we have no reason to care about. It’s not the case that there is any real complexity to be read between the lines here either. Rather, nothing much is said. Conversation flows somewhat awkwardly and while at a push this could be forgiven a few times as the natural way in which the characters communicate, it happens so often that one wonders if it’s the best the writers were capable of.
The plot of Road 96 was heartfelt and realistic enough to be believable – a wave of teenagers fleeing the border for a new life. This is mentioned in Mile 0, too, but the story doesn’t build a convincing dystopia to escape from; the protagonists live an irresponsible life of petty crime, and the tyranny of the government comes over not as a sinister, evil political machination, but rather a cartoon joke dreamt up by a child. There is not the depth or intelligence here that the first game so benefited from.
Side Characters:
Some of the side characters from Road 96 make an appearance, which on the one hand I was glad to see, but there is so little expansion on the events of Road 96 that Mile 0 almost doesn’t feel it was set in the same world beyond a few hollow references to the Wall of ’86, and the raising of a few names familiar to the first game – a tragically missed opportunity, especially with the characters who were hinted to have deep backstories in Road 96.
’Choices’:
Some of the choices strangely affect consequences, too. In one case I was deemed to have lost support for the revolution because I asked about the safety of my parents. Another time, I was thinking on something to myself in one of the game’s scenes, but the thought had consequences. Both implicit suggestions by the game are absurd: that one cannot care for their family and support a revolution; and that one cannot explore an idea without it affecting their beliefs. These false dichotomies are the sorts of conclusions only fools reach, as the intelligent recognise nuance.
Only at the end of the game, in the final short chapter, after hours of drudgery through those horrid skating scenes and shallow dialogue, is there some of the charm that made the first game. The camera familiarly pans up from the road, and there a scene unfolds that just managed to stir my emotions, and set the stage for where we meet Zoe in the first game. Just for a few minutes, Mile 0 showed it didn’t completely forget the source material. But it wasn’t enough – not nearly – to redeem itself.

Visuals:

Mile 0 is stylised, like the first game, although I never found it looked as good. It has a distinctly cartoon feel about it, and while Road 96 did too, it managed to be eerie and beautiful; serene and ugly, all when the game’s narrative required it. Mile 0 just looks low-quality. Save for one or two scenes, it didn’t set the mood nearly as well as the first game.

Audio:

The soundtrack couldn’t save Mile 0 from its mediocrity either. Used to great effect in the original game to draw out emotion. It’s not that it’s unfitting to the game’s genre or setting, it’s just that it has no great writing or characters to complement, and so isn’t elevated by anything. The fact that I didn’t personally like many of the tracks might account for my lack of praise here, but I also didn’t like most of the tracks in the last game either, and despite this could still (and did) praise their power in making the game the great experience it was. For a game so centred around the beat of music, Mile 0 misses nearly every beat that gave the first game its heart.

Conclusion:

Mile 0 is an absurdly comical game that is not funny, portrays a political dystopia as a caricature, and tells the tale of two teenagers who don’t feel like they understand the slightest thing about the political world they find themselves in. It is not made with nearly the same love or intelligence as the first game, and for so much of its runtime there are no reasons to care about anyone or anything that happens.
It is a pitiful prequel to the far superior Road 96. It has all the charm and grace of the average mobile game; the creativity of a party-political broadcast; the believability of a politician’s promise and the charm of a newsreader. So little of the deep, humanist struggle for a better world that made the first game so powerful and memorable found its way into Mile 0 until the final scene, where it was too little too late. It wastes your time with boring minigames and hollow dialogue and squanders its chance to give a powerful catalyst to the events of the original game with all except the last act, which cannot atone for the drudgery that came before. You can spend your money on better than this.