Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

The Basics: 3rd person tactical rpg (think X-Com or Final Fantasy Tactics meets WWI + Monsters)

Previous Time Spent: none

Expectation of learning Curve: medium

Why I bought this: Extremely cheap steam sale + decent reviews and Lovecraft focus

First Impressions: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, looks and feels a bit clunky at first. The graphics are a bit dated and ugly (which is fair, considering that the popular imagination of World War I is fairly drab/ugly). It immediately introduces fun stock characters, and the idea of a trench based tactical role-playing game with tons in common with Chaosium's table-top roleplaying game. The biggest frustration I had when I started was that I couldn't figure out how to look around the map further than the immediate area my characters inhabited, but this was later resolved. 

My 3 hours: Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is divided into a number of missions, following the story of a British Company working alongside a professor of antiquities(or whatever Lovecraftian professor stock character he was) fighting against the evils of a German Cult. The missions are somewhat challenging, and often involve shifting circumstances, but basically break down into the same rhythm that X-Com players may remember. Moving from cover to to cover, setting up overwatch, covering advances, flanking, etc. This is all made more interesting by  the specificity of the setting , and the challenges of trench warfare.

Between missions, there is an interface for advancing characters, which are broken down between redshirt types and mission-critical characters, all of which can die. Their stats and skills were very familiar to me, being based on what appears to be a simplified version of Chaosium's venerable and popular Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying system. (All skills are based on percentages, which stats are similar enough to how they work in D&D for most people to be able to parse it without breaking too much of a sweat.) The characters have a varied skillset, and the story that I played through seemed interesting enough. When I hit my three hour mark, I found myself honestly wishing for more.  

High

My Highlight: For me, the highlight of my experience was a challenging mission that took up most of my 3rd hour of play. In this mission, my band of troops and assorted weirdos (including a psycho-analyst, professor, and martial artist(beefy white guy with mutton chops and a club) had to fight their way through trenches, poison gas, zombies and machine-gun armed Germans to a church, which we had to defend from Germans and Zombies while our professor figured something out inside. It was tense, and consistently felt like I was being pushed to the limits of the resouces I had available. Just a really well designed(and fairly challenging mission)

My Verdict: I strongly recommend this for x-com/final fantasy tactics/Lovecraft nerds like myself. For others, your mileage may vary, as the corniness or the rough edges might be a bit overwhelming. 

My next post will come in roughly 2 weeks, where I'll be covering Chivalry:Medieval Warfare