Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land review

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based strategy game set in the trenches of the First World War, where the influence of malign cultists and ancient forces of incomprehensible power may be about to turn the Great War into mankind’s final battle for survival. Based on the fiction of HP Lovecraft and the tabletop gaming system by Chaosium, The Wasted Land puts you in control of a small band of soldiers and scholars who’ve been given the task of uncovering the activities of the mysterious Cult of the Awakened.

As the game begins, Professor Brightmeer, a scholar from Miskatonic University has been assigned by British intelligence to join Captain Hill and his troops at the front. The landscape through which they must fight has been devastated by war, pockmarked with blast holes and scarred by trenches. You’ll soon have to keep your men alive as they assault enemy trenches in an attempt to obtain evidence of the cult’s activities.

Every character has their own stats, and you must make the most of their abilities

Each of your units is an individual character with their own skills and stats. Each gets a certain number of action points which can be invested in movement, combat or using an item such as a first aid kit. Although your squad gradually gains new members as the game progresses, there are several core individuals who must be kept alive to reach the end of each stage. Fortunately, you have three turns to revive characters who’ve been knocked out before they die. Successfully completing each level often calls for lateral thinking over brute force – when in doubt, the best course of action is often to make a tactical escape rather than attempting to outgun the superior technology and dark powers wielded by your enemies.

Every time you complete a mission, you’re given a financial reward with a bonus for getting your entire team out alive. You can spend this on equipment such as first aid kits and vitality boosts, armour or increasingly powerful weapons. You’ll also get experience points to invest in the team’s combat and scholarly skills. Both will prove vital as their discoveries lead them into direct conflict with unearthly monstrosities which attack your party’s sanity in dream sequences as well as making physical assaults in reality.

The Wasted Land’s greatest weakness is that its controls are unchanged from its touchscreen incarnation for iOS. Everything is done by either single-clicking, double-clicking or clicking and dragging with the left mouse button. This is all very handy if you happen to be playing on a touchscreen PC, but we’d have appreciated some alternative key bindings for standard mouse and keyboard users.

We also found that some of the on-screen buttons were rather insensitive. Perhaps because they’ve been scaled up from tablet size to fit our large screen and 1,920×1,080 resolutions, the clickable areas of buttons and objects were often too small and oddly located. Once we’d worked out where we had to click to actually get a response, we soon got to grips with the controls, although selecting units, particularly wounded characters passed out on the ground, could still be fiddly at times.

The graphics are functional, betraying its iOS origins

The top-down isometric graphics are functional and reasonably attractive – characters and enemies are easy to distinguish and the environmental design is well rendered. Sound is effective, albeit limited to ominous background effects and echoing gunfire. We spotted a couple of typos and grammatical errors in the narrative and dialogue panels, but otherwise these storytelling elements get the atmosphere spot on.

Although its control system can be absolutely infuriating at times, The Wasted Land provides a surprisingly deep and engaging strategic challenge, and one which really drew us in. Even the early levels require you to examine your surroundings and objectives, rather than merely throw everything you’ve got at enemies with insanely powerful weapons. The Lovecraftian storyline also adds to the game’s appeal for fans of the genre.

If you’re not a particular fan of either Lovecraft or turn-based strategy, then The Wasted Land’s not the best introduction to either. However, at just over £3 from Intel’s AppUp store, strategy fans who like their pan-dimensional horror should definitely snap this up and dive straight into its slippery clutches.