The Wasted Land’s wasted opportunity

Posted by on March 12, 2012 in Reviews

The developers at Red Wasp Design have a great sense of atmosphere. Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is so promising as it boots up, with a picture of Lovecraft in all his gangly ungainly glory. Something scratchy plays at a slightly wrong speed on a gramophone, half way between warbly singing and sinister chanting. This off-kilter spirit of Lovecraft carries into the mission intros, with the characters talking to each other in suitably “period” dialogue. They’re the band of investigators you’d find in any session of Chaosium’s tabletop RPG. Gung ho British soldiers are the cheerful muscle, infused with the can-do spirit of the not quite fallen British Empire. The brains of the party are a plucky psychologist and an occultist in a turban, each with a gun in one hand and a spell book in the other.

It’s World War I. A cult of eldritch god worshippers has insinuated itself among German soldiers. Undead and Leng spiders and eventually worse are shuffling and scuttling about the trenches and mustard gas and ruined cathedrals. It’s up to your ragtag band to get to the heart of the matter.

Then, after the jump, the gameplay happens

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a great set up for a game that never shows up. What does show up is a not very good tactical turn-based game that loses sight of the Lovecraft. It quickly grinds to a stuttering stop-and-go all-but-halt littered with tiny pieces, tiny buttons, and tiny numbers. Most of The Wasted Land is a rote you-shoot/they-shoot punch and counterpunch on a grid that might fare better on an iPad, but not by much.

It’s mostly all about gunplay, and upgrading armor and weapons between missions. You can eventually dink around with poorly explained spells. Sanity is another resource to manage in a game where the resource management is obscure and hard to follow. You lose a few points of sanity when you shoot at a monster. This means your psychologist has to work as a medic, in addition to the normal medicking of spending medkits and sometimes taking the time to walk over to a medical station and stand around for a turn or two.

Stats are teensy granular affairs of putting a point here, a point there, much like the gameplay itself. An action point here, an action point there, here a 61%, there a 74%, all scrunched together on the iPhone’s screen as if this were an ill conceived port of something for the PC. Scrolling around the cluttered screen to take a few potshots with a pistol is often more work than it’s worth. Moving your party together is also more work than it’s worth, which is the worst thing you can say about a game’s core concept; in any horror movie or tactical combat game, you have to stick together or those things will get you.

These are problems that have been solved admirably since X-Com, often in the various SRPGs published by Atlus or NIS. But Red Wasp Design seems to prefer detail to elegance, and that’s exactly the wrong call to make on the iPhone. It’s also a damn shame in a game with such an obvious affection for its own characters and the Lovecraft mythos.

2 stars
iOS

  • Broooski

    It’s not much better on the iPad. I got so discouraged with the gameplay that I gave up, but was holding out hope that someone would find some Lovercraftian wonder-story at the end that would convince me to come back. I’m sorry to hear it didn’t work out that way.

  • Barac Wiley

    As much as I love Cthulhu Mythos stuff, and as much as I love SRPGs, they’re two great flavors that do not belong together. I had some small hope that they might pull this one out of the ill conceived premise…but it appears not.

  • Sam Levine

    Wow, I have to say, this is the Chick review I’ve most disagreed with, despite being a long time reader.  I’ve only tried this title on iPad, though, which might explain the discrepancy, as it wipes out some of the problems mentioned in the review (too-tiny UI and difficult scrolling).  The version I played also included a thorough help section, which explained the systems completely to my satisfaction.

    I’m also a big fan of Lovecraftian horror and tactical RPGs, and I thought the flavors mixed brilliantly here, so I’d hate for those with similar tastes to pass this up.

  • Broooski

    I only played a few missions, but the iPad version seemed to have the same problem the iPhone version did, which was that most of the time you were shooting at something that was further than one screen away from you. So you had to select your character, and then scroll to the target. Then, after you fired, the camera re-centered on the active character, so you had to scroll *again* to re-target, and then fire. But sometimes the “fire” tap just selected the enemy unit, so you had to scroll back and select your original character, then scroll *back* to target the enemy, and you get the idea. The perspective angle they chose also made it a bit tricky to select the square you wanted, especially in the trenches. Lastly, the mission design was just “here come some guys, shoot them” interspersed with going back to heal at the magic healo box. Because of the distance-v-screen size, it was hard to guess who would have line of sight to whom, so you just had to let the game tell you, which means strategy was just “shoot at the closest visible guy.” It all felt pretty uninspired.

    But like I said, I only played a few missions before I gave up, so if that changed, maybe it got better, but I wouldn’t put this down to just iPhone vs iPad. I did try it once on the iPhone and thought it was pretty much unplayable on that tiny screen.

  • tomchick

    I’m glad you liked the game, Sam, because I really want Red Wasp to do another Cthulhu game of some sort. Their hearts are obviously in the right place, and they seem to really appreciate the mythos. But I think they’re partly stacking the deck against themselves by making a game in which the main gameplay mechanic is shooting a gun. That it doesn’t work as well as other similar games about shooting a gun just further hurts the experience for me.

    But I do hope the game does well for them, and I appreciate your enthusiasm for it.

  • http://twitter.com/CHGardiner Chris Gardiner

    Agreed. I was really excited for this, and found the gameplay fiddly, clumsy and unsatisfying, even with the extra real estate of the iPad. A real shame.

  • Tony M

    I’m torn.  On one hand, Tom doesn’t like it.  On the other hand, Turn Based Cthulhu.

  • Maxim

    I have to second Sam – I liked the game so much, that I have played it to it´s conclusion despite the fiddly controls.

    There is a button to speed up the animations, that I did not notice until the end. It helps to get over the slog of moving units long distances.

    The game gets 3 things right in my opinion: atmosphere, resource management and difficulty.

    Tom already described the atmosphere that is setup by the initial impression of the game. Later the game turns into a mix of Lovecraft and a cheesy (in a good way) superhero story. I have never had enough money to buy all the goodies and never had enough XP to feel overpowered. The last few levels really were a challenge, where I had to wing it from turn to turn. It´s a long time a game has managed to do that. The AI is rudimentary, but your opponents are mighty and plentiful so there was always the threat of loosing.

    I really liked the game – it´s not an RPG, but a Silent Storm clone in the world of Lovecraft on the Ipad. And in this regard it delivered quite well.

  • Symmetry

    For some reason I completely loved this game. iPad certainly helped – after a couple of levels the controls felt natural, which they really aren’t – but that wasn’t it. This game somehow felt more like XCom (as I remember it from a far distance) than anything I’ve played in years. Maybe it was the Sanity mechanic, discovering a few levels too late that my shooty-shooty character was now so very fragile because he went insane after every round, that reminded me of losing my sniper because I never trained on psionics.

    At heart I think it was the atmosphere, combined with a game where figuring out the mechanics (and what you did wrong) is a lot of the game. I loved it, but was impossibly über on the second playthrough (even on hard). And then I tried Hunters 2 in hopes of more of the same, but the atmosphere and mystery are missing – it feels more like the game that Tom reviewed, to me.

    So if you feel like a slow paced, nicely atmospheric game that ends too soon, this might be worth giving a second chance.