H. P. Lovecraft entertained us with stories of madness and the unknown back in the early 20th century. Known for his works of ‘The Shadow out of Time and ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, his other work, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ is what this game is based on (obviously). Now a registered trademark of Chaosium Inc, this game is centred on The Call of Cthulhu RPG. Originally made for the iOS, the ported PC version is quite reasonable, despite its apparent handset limitations as there are no real extra features to take advantage of the PC. Yet it’s entertaining enough to finish due to its tactical nature.
Based on the story ‘The Reanimator’, the game’s setting is during the dark days of World War I – 1915 to be exact. So expect plenty of trench warfare as you play the part of the British forces fighting off the Germans however, there’s a more sinister force behind this which is older than humanity itself, using the carnage of World War I to build its undead army deep beneath the battlefields of Europe. So the backdrop to this game is pretty impressive as there are not many games that can utilise World War I effectively as this game has done so far.
The gameplay can be described as a turn based tactical role playing game (RPG), meaning each player take turns performing actions based on his / her action points (AP). And because it’s a RPG, each character / monstrosities all have their equivalent statistics. Also it has a decent array of skills to choose from and everything is based on gaining experience points (XP). XP is gained by completing missions, scoring critical hits and killing monsters. Also there’s a final score at the end of each mission for which, quite frankly, I have no idea what it’s based on – could be that how many turns it took to complete it? The manual doesn’t explain this portion well enough.
To make a good tactical turned based game, the player should have a myriad of options like prone, full aim, fog of war, basically anything that simulates as close as possible to the real deal. Yet in The Wasted Lands, there’s not much tactics to employ. Granted you can spend all the action points to achieve full aim and there’s accommodation for cover (marked as a shield icon) however that’s as far it gets. Yet don’t let that deter you as each mission are quite varied, ranging from all-out attack to group separation to defending a location to limited turns to complete a mission. The variety of each mission will keep you on your toes as you will employ different skills each time to resolve them.
Each mission can consist of one to three objectives. There is one though that has seven objectives however expect one to three on average. Also take note of the objectives as some missions requires certain characters to perform a certain task. This is particularly important as there are timed missions where you cannot possibly kill off all the monsters and still complete the mission within the allocated turns. So there’s a fine line between completing an objective and which character/s to do this with. Also, because this game plays a lot with spawning enemies, expect monsters that suddenly appear quite literally out of nowhere. Yet the way to recognise this (other than scanning the entire map) is to listen to the low dreary musical tone indicating more monsters are on its way.
As explained before, completing each mission earns experience points and this is the only way to make your characters grow in strength. Experience points can be allocated to their primary stats (strength, dexterity, intelligence, hit points and power) or their skills like rifles, first aid and so on. Also, being based on the RPG, there are magical spells to cast and skills to reduce loss sanity points. Yet I found the spells are not worth the effort as the cause (loss sanity points) far outweighs the effect (damage). So I use the formula of two tanks (heavily armoured melee people), two riflemen and two spell casters. Well the spell casters are mainly build for healing like regenerating hit points / sanity. But of course you can create whatever party formation you desire.
Speaking of sanity, the Call of Cthulhu RPG uses this as the soul of the game. It’s no different here as after all, you are human. So when fighting the denizens of the dark, each attack, whether it be a hit / miss or just being attacked, makes you lose insanity points. Once it reaches zero, your character can do two things, paralyse in fear for one turn or go on a ballistic rampage, meaning doubles your action points. So you can, in effect, use this to your advantage however the downside to this is, once this insanity round is over, your character will lie down unconscious and if not treated quickly, will die. To cure loss sanity points is like healing wounds, using the right equipment. So this places a nice twist of worrying for both loss sanity and health.
The user interface (UI) does suffer a lot from ‘mobilisation’. Granted there are huge buttons to press however, sometimes by hovering over a button thinks you have pressed it and other times, you need to click on it – other words, pretty inconsistent. Also trading items between players can be improved a lot yet I won’t go into details why or how yet the worst part of it all is the arcane save system. You have only one save slot period and once you are in a mission, you can never go back to the main menu to start the mission again. Why you need to take note of this is because some missions will be extremely helpful if you have certain items and equally painfully difficult if you don’t. Meaning that considering each character only has room for just two inventory slots, I have caught off-guard where a certain item will be extremely beneficial for which I don’t have. Yet there is a small saviour - read carefully the end mission text as it does provide a small clue of what’s ahead in the next mission.
Other oddities are there’s no friendly fire so firing right from the back of the line poses no threat to your comrades; there’s no ammo count so open fire at will (yet this is a good thing considering each character only has two inventory slots), no weapon maintenance, no jamming, no prone, no fog of war, little weapon variety however the weapons used are authentic enough for that period. So expect to use the Lee Enfield Rifle, Webley Revolver, the Lewis Gun and so on.
Also there are other weapons for which I applaud the developer’s imagination like the Artillery Spotter (using a pigeon to call an air strike) and the most powerful melee weapon in the game, the shovel. I thought that was totally cool as granted, the shovel is a pretty powerful melee weapon as it is and not some ‘my first weapon other than the knife’. Also take note of the chemical protection skill (representing a gas mask) as staying true to WW1, there’s plenty of mustard gas about. Seriously, increase this skill to max (as it’s only three ‘steps’ being 33%, 66% and 99% protection) and you will thank me later.
The graphics is not too bad for a ported handset game. Has the feel of the Silent Storm series however not the sophistication of that engine like destructible environments. Nevertheless it does serve its purpose with a top down view with very little frame rates drops. Both overland and underground environments are nice to look at with equally recognisable features. Likewise are the sounds however I quite like the opening musical score where it plays an authentic version of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. Also take note of that low key dreary sound indicating more monsters of the damn arrived on the battle field.
The game itself has eleven missions and each one can take about an hour or so. Also note that even though the maps are quite small, it’s the nature of turned based combat that makes it longer. And as mentioned before, each mission will test a variety of skills therefore boredom won’t come easily. That said, because it’s a ported game, it’s a decent one at that however it could benefit more if the game has added features to compliment the PC world and not a direct copy from the mobile world, as highly evident from the user interface. But it’s certainly a decent game to play despite the lack of features that you come to expect from a good turned based game like Silent Storm, Gorky or the Jagged Alliance series. Plenty of love was poured into this game so it’s a worthwhile trip that pays respectable homage to H. P. Lovecraft.
7.5 / 10