The Third Reich were bad enough to begin with, but now they’ve got squid-men there’s twice as much reason to gun them down in Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics. Developed by Auroch Digital, it’s a pure tactics game with some light RPG elements based on Modiphius’s pulpy Call Of Cthulhu spinoff tabletop setting – it’s out now.

While superficially similar to XCOM, Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics seems more like Call Of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land with a dash of Hellboy. A team of military hard-nuts and mystics fight a secret war against Nazi mad scientists, occultists and monsters from beyond. Below, a launch trailer and a two hour walkthrough with the devs.



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And here’s two hours of the game being played by one of its developers earlier today, which should give you a good feel for how the game works.



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While cribbing its UI from Firaxis’s XCOM (it’s a good design), Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics seems less rigid, with each character given a generous pool of action points allowing them to juggle shooting, movement and special abilities all in a single turn, or you can just shoot three times in a row because one particular Nazi needs to die right now. Judging by the stream footage above, missions seem lengthy, with optional bonus objectives providing more experience to upgrade your squad of four monster-hunters between missions, though there’s no strategic layer.

While I doubt that the game will devour night after night the same way XCOM 2 can (especially with that free DLC on the way), it does look like a fun time – tactical comfort food. Shooting Nazis seldom gets old, and mixing things up with a little pulp science-fantasy is a formula that has always worked well – just ask Wolfenstein. Maybe I just like the idea of gruff 40s action heroes casually wading into situations that would drive one of Lovecraft’s protagonists mad.

Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is out now on Steam for £20/€25/$25.