Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a turn-based strategy title with minor RPG elements. As you may have guessed from the name, the game is based off of H.P. Lovecraft's works within the Cthulhu Mythos; it also features some narrative based off of Herbert West - Reanimator. Since the developer/publisher Red Wasp Design Ltd have disband, this title has been disabled for purchase on the store page. That being said, there are keys still floating around if you truly wish to buy or trade for it.
Set in the year 1915 during World War I, you will control a team of investigators and soldiers who have been sent on a mission to investigate the Cult of the Awakened. The head of the cult, Docktor Kaul, has stolen the reanimation technology from Herbert West and he has combined it with arcane mythos magic in order to raise a powerful undead army using the casualties from The Great War. Docktor Kaul wants to eliminate all of humanity to make room for a new, superior, hybrid species; half human, half Star Spawn of Cthulhu.
I'm personally a huge fan of Cthulhu and H.P. Lovecraft in general. It saddens me to say that this game is abysmally boring; what you see in the trailer is pretty much what you get. The environments are almost soundless, the gameplay is excruciatingly slow-paced, the dialogue is uninteresting, and the level designs are dull with a good chunk of them featuring trenches. From the screenshots and trailer on the store page, you may think that you will be playing in a semi-open world, but in reality the maps are suffocatingly small. All of this makes sense once you know that Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is a mobile port, one that surprisingly won a few awards.
A lot of people have had problems with the mechanics of the game, but if you take the Basic Training course at the beginning they're much easier to understand. They're still pretty awful controls, but at least there is a small tutorial. If you left click an enemy, the screen jumps to it and reveals all of its stats; you have to right click it to attack. Each investigator/soldier has a set of numbers that indicates their health, action points, and sanity. Action points are used to move around the map and attack monsters, and they can be reset by ending your turn. The sanity points go down each time the character attacks and/or gets hit by a foe that is not of the human variety.
If a character runs out of sanity, they either freeze up for several turns or go in to a manic mode, dealing a ton of damage but then they become incapacitated afterward. If you fail to revive an incapacitated team member, they die within a set number of turns; this can also be said for when all health points are depleted. If a "main member" dies, you must restart the entire level again. Some levels also have a limited amount of turns that can be expended before the level will end in a game over. In many cases, you must also wait X amount of turns for one of the main investigators to research something before you can move forward.
Each investigator and soldier can have two weapons, two items, and two pieces of armor; the further progress you make in the game, the more weapons, items, and armor that you unlock. However, you must purchase these things from the store at the end of each level. Likewise, you also spend any earned experience points at the end of a level. You only get one massive sum of XP, it is not divided up per character. Honestly, the game is made easy even on hard difficulty if you just put all of the XP into the rifle weapon for each character, and buy rifles for each of them. They do the most damage, and have the longest range. It's a huge loophole that negates almost any challenge that this title could've had.
Overall, the most irritating thing about this title is the fact that every single time you attack an enemy, the screen has to jump to center on it; even if you're just a couple of steps away. The timing isn't always the same, so while your eyes are expecting the quick motion and follow through with it, it doesn't happen, leaving your eyes to constantly want to dart all over the place. This lovely feature, combined with some of the most dry and dusty gameplay ever conceived, makes Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land hard to recommend even to the most avid H.P. Lovecraft fan.
Rating: 2.0/5.0 - It's not awful, but it's not great.The Horror Network
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