I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

-Revelation‬ ‭3:15-16‬ ‭(KJV)‬‬

“The following is a contributor post by the Badly Backlogged Mage.”

Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics reminded me of some truly great games: the elegant rebooted XCOM, the engaging storytelling of Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and the intricate design of 2018’s Battletech. With each turn, I thought of those games more and more, until with one fateful turn I could stand it no longer – I rose suddenly to my feet, and with my arms outstretched to the elder gods themselves I cried:

“WHY, OH WHY AREN’T I PLAYING ONE OF THOSE GAMES INSTEAD??”

I exaggerate. Slightly. It’s not that Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is bad, it’s just insipid. It has some nice individual ideas but taken as a package, it adds nothing new to a well-mined genre. Frustratingly, while it has a great licence and premise, it has absolutely no idea what to do with it.

But first, some background.

Mechanically, what are we looking at here?

Considering the nature of this website, I’m going to assume that you know what a turn-based tactics game is. This particular version has no broader metagame like XCOM, and it’s not an RPG like Wasteland 2 or Divinity: Original Sin. It’s a tactics game, pure and simple, with a little RPG-style progression with powers/levelling up, but that’s it.

OK, so what’s “Achtung! Cthulhu”?

“Achtung! Cthulhu” was originally a pen+paper RPG setting for both the “Savage Worlds” and “Call of Cthulhu” game systems, as well as a miniatures game. It’s a pulp-WWII-adventure take on HP Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos – it’s a straight up Nazi-occultists vs Allied-occultists story. The pedant in me must immediately point out that this is about as Lovecraftian as the Easter Bunny, but what the hey – it’s a fun idea. Apparently it’s had some success on Kickstarter.

I’d never heard of Achtung! Cthulhu before, but the inherent silliness of the idea appealed to me. And I like tactics games, so it seemed like a match made in heaven. But looks can be deceiving.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one…

The UI borrows an awful lot from XCOM, which is mostly a good thing. It’s a very clean aesthetic, which is impressive considering that it’s a fairly complex system. Unit facing, cover, flanking, AP costs – all neatly and simply conveyed. It’s also got a pretty good tutorial, so if you’re new to the world of tactics games, you’ll be able to pick it up quite quickly.

There’s a few neat additions to the standard “tactics” formula. My personal favourite is that powers are powered by a shared resource called “momentum”, rather than individual MP or cool-downs. This doesn’t sound like much but it forces you to co-ordinate your soldiers, especially as some powers increase momentum while others cost it. The net effect is that a functioning team feels like a perfectly-synchronised machine – some members get the momentum while the others use it.

Naturally there’s a sanity meter (oh sorry, “stress”. Thanks, Darkest Dungeon) or it wouldn’t be a Cthulhu game. If a soldier’s stress bar files up they’ll behave erratically for a turn, then stress returns to zero. It sounds nice but in practice it’s utterly vestigial – it feels like it’s been tacked on because “Lovecraft games have sanity meters”. The problem is that it doesn’t require the player to adjust their playstyle. You get stress from being shot or seeing monsters – you can’t stop your PCs from seeing monsters, and you’re already trying to stop them from getting shot, so its strategic significance is very low. Pretty soon you’ll ignore it completely, especially considering it resets to zero at the end of each combat (that’s each combat, not each mission).

A slightly more interesting feature is the luck meter. When your soldiers get hit, all damage is applied first to their luck-bar and then to their health. Health generally doesn’t replenish during a mission, but luck (like stress) refills at the end of each combat. The result is that the game is quite forgiving to “full charge”-type strategies that would get you killed in XCOM, but unfortunately I didn’t fully appreciate this until I was about 50% of the way through.

I suspect that the game had intended that I would adopt “full charge” tactics as a result of its last unique gameplay addition – an unusual “fog of war” setting. Unlike most games, Acthung! Cthulhu Tactics has a halfway house in its fog of war, where you can see that there is AN enemy, but you can’t make out what it is. Enemies in this half-light are called “shrouded”, and while you can trade shots with them, you do so at a big disadvantage to hit. I think the idea was to encourage me to charge into the darkness to uncover the shrouded enemies, and I suppose it succeeded to an extent, but it wasn’t enough.

The wheels start to fall off

My first and biggest problem with Achtung! Cthulhu is difficulty. It’s gone out of its way to use XCOM’s UI, and XCOM’s difficulty is notorious. So when I booted up the game and saw XCOM, I played it like XCOM: very carefully and cautiously.

It wasn’t until mission 4 that an enemy even got a shot off at me. In mission 5, they finally landed a hit. It was about this time that I realized that I may as well just charge, guns blazing, across every battlefield. In mission 7 one of my men finally fell to the Nazi’s eldritch horrors and became…incapacitated.

Incapacitated? Am I fighting Cthulhu or Pokémon??

He wasn’t even out of action for the rest of the mission; one of my other soldiers could just run over and bring him back to life with a full luck bar (and zero health). At this point I gave up on strategy – all of my earlier covering of sightlines and flanking was for naught. Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics requires precious little by way of tactics.

The problems continue

So the tactics angle was a wash. But what about the story-telling? Achtung! Cthulhu was originally an RPG, and it’s a story-rich set-up. Surely they could pull something off in the story department?

Nope.

Not only does Achtung! Cthulhu not really have a story, the story it has makes no sense.

Story in this game is told entirely through your mission briefing and a closing/ending cinematic at the start and end of the game. There is almost no in-game text. Even that can work – Starcraft told some pretty decent stories through mission briefings – Except here the mission briefing is always a letter being read out to you by a commander: zero dialogue, zero characters, zero story development.

You start off fighting Nazis in the forest for… reasons… and next thing you know you’re told that your mission is so important that it can’t fail now. When I heard that, I assumed I’d fallen asleep and missed an entrance by the exposition fairy. WHAT mission? I’d been randomly killing Nazis in the woods for several hours by this stage, and had long ago assumed that my sole motivation was filling in time until I found the teddy bear’s picnic.

Good writing constantly raises the stakes. Bad writing tells you that the stakes have now been raised. This was definitely the latter. And also nonsensical.

The last ditch effort

So there’s no story, there’s no challenge. But is it at least “fun”? Can it live up to the campy romp implied by the premise of “good Cthulhu occultist vs Nazi Cthulhu occultist”?

Oddly, yes. A bit. The game engine is tight and efficient, and the UI makes the moment-to-moment gameplay quite enjoyable. There’s a decent range of weapons and powers, and there is fun to be had in figuring out effective combinations of powers and tactics. Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near enough to carry the game off by itself. Perhaps if there was more variety in enemy types you’d at least get a feeling of progression, discovery and a periodic “shove” to force new tactics, a la XCOM. I don’t think it’s an accident that by far the game’s most engaging battle is its final one – “Shoggoth in a Tank”.

I would like to acknowledge that, if you know anything at all about Lovecraft’s works, the phrase “Shoggoth in a Tank” is utterly ridiculous.

The lack of enemy variety is particularly bewildering when you consider the licence they were working with. The Cthulhu Mythos has a bewildering array of unique beasties – a Hounds of Tindalos can teleport, but only through sharp corners. A “Colour out of Space” drains the life-force of any nearby living creature. Byakees can fly, Deep Ones can swim, and there’s countless beings who can possess people or drive them mad. So why does this game ignore all of them and give us either Nazis or blobs? (Alright, “Shoggoths”.)

The most bewildering thing about this game is that it takes a really good IP and then does nothing with it. Nazi-Cthulhu-Turn-Based-Tactics is a great idea! I signed up to review it based on that premise alone! But this really feels more like tactics-Wolfenstein than Cthulhu – if it weren’t for the stress meter and the word “Shoggoth” you would have no idea that there was supposed to be a Lovecraftian influence at all.

The final word

So do I recommend it?

No.

It’s a shame, because a lot of work and a surprising amount of polish has gone into it. But it falls flat because it feels more like a game-programmer wanted to use their neat game engine, rather than a game-designer wanted to make a neat game.

Visuals: 6/10

The visuals are effective, but not much to speak of. There’s only one terrain area (forest), and a limited number of enemy types. Still, as soon as you click “New Campaign” the visuals effectively convey the time period, the setting, and a sense of adventure.

As noted above, the UI is very clean and effective, although the fact that they’re mostly ripping off XCOM would have helped that a lot.

Audio: 7/10

Much like the visuals, the audio is quite effective. The voice work is pretty good, the music sets the “cosmic horror” atmosphere, the sound effects convey the thrill of the fight. There’s no “soundtrack” to speak of, but this is the sort of game where the fact that you don’t notice the audio suggests that it’s doing its job.

Gameplay: 7/10

Mechanically this game is pretty good. I particularly like is that you can reset your PCs’ skills every three missions. It strikes a great balance of giving your decisions weight whilst letting you try out different combinations.

As noted above, I also applaud the introduction of “momentum” as a shared resource to use special powers. It feels far more organic than the arbitrary “two turn cooldown” in most tactics games and encourages you to use the team in synchronisation – use team member A to gain “momentum”, and team member B to use it. I am hard pressed to think of any other tactics game that so uniquely captured the feeling of a team running in synchronisation, rather than a collection of super-powered individuals.

Narrative: 1/10

HP Lovecraft is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Call of Cthulhu is one of the best story-intense pen-and-paper game systems ever made.

I understand that narrative was not intended to be a selling point of this title. But to take the pedigree of such IPs and then churn out a story that doesn’t even make sense is simply unforgivable.

At the end of the game you’re told that your characters then went on and had a much more interesting adventure against a person with an actual name. So… you had a more interesting story to tell, but just decided not to tell it?

Accessibility: 7/10

The UI is very neat and the tutorial is quite effective. It’s hard for me to judge this one because I’m so familiar with the genre, but my assessment is that for a fairly complex game-system, it’s quite easy to get into.

Challenge: 3/10

When I give this game a low score for “challenge” I do not mean that it was too easy (although it was), I mean that its difficulty level is poorly set.

The real problem here is that their UI so closely resembles XCOM, which made me (as a person who played a lot of XCOM) approach this game in the same super-cautious way. And it’s not meant to be played like that. I suspect that you’re meant to play this game in the carefree-fun-adventure romp style of its source material.

Which is unfortunate, because not only does its UI not send that message, but the dark “cosmic horror” elements of its visuals and audio don’t deliver it either. This game probably needed to convey a feeling that was more like Indiana Jones and less like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.

Uniqueness: 6/10

Gameplay-wise it’s pretty derivative, although most tactics games are to some extent. I’ve scored it as 6.5/10 mostly because of the neat touches to the standard tactics genre, and also because I don’t think I’ve ever seen “Nazi Cthulhu Mythos” before.

Personal grade: 4/10

In the wash up, I didn’t enjoy this game and I don’t recommend it. It’s not awful, no, but there is no compelling reason to play it unless you’re particularly into tactics games or Lovecraft games, or you really want to try a tactics game and the premise appeals to you.

Aggregated score: 5.1

The Badly Backlogged Mage courageously fights a rearguard action against his unfortunate spending habits. You can follow his crusade at https://mrbacklog.wordpress.com/

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