Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land review

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.