Review for Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics. Game for PC, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One, the video game was released on 04/10/2018
Acthung! Cthulhu Tactics is a very interesting title, produced by Auroch Digital e Ripstone Games, which we got to try during the last one Gamescom. Interesting because it carries the mythological cycle of Cthulhu, and all the other terrifying alien deities created by the master HP Lovecraft (atmospheres that we can also find in the recent Call of Cthulhu), at the end of the Second World War when the Nazis, given the turn that events were taking, tried to play a last, sinister, card.
Cornered, the German high commands then decided to bring two particular divisions into the field. The men of the Natchwolfe, super-trained SS corps and equipped with experimental equipment of dubious origin and the Black Sun, an esoteric military group made up of scholars and cultists of abominable and ancient gods, whose components are not just human beings, at least not quite.
In fact, among the ranks of the Black Sun, we can also find grotesque hybrids between man and "something else", demonic officers and many other horrendous surprises.
The Allied secret services, on the other hand, were certainly not idle, realizing that these two "particular" Nazi divisions were organizing something big in a gloomy and ancient forest in the north of occupied France.
For this reason, after several adventures, the Anglo Americans sending a mixed task force on a mission, composed of four elements who, for better or for worse, have experiences in their background outside the ordinary that have given them a particular aptitude to fight against supernatural forces and, in some cases, even dark powers to use during the mission, such as Ariane Dubois, a French Resistance fighter who saw her parents killed by the Black Sun and, in order to take revenge, made a pact with a creepy demonic creature following her perched on her shoulder like a grotesque parrot and giving her the power to suck the life force out of opponents.
After this premise on the setting, let's move on to the actual game. Acthung! Cthulhu Tactics is a turn-based strategic (or rather tactical) one inspired, both for themes and regulations, by the homonymous boardgame with miniatures.
The game is basically divided into two phases: an exploratory and a combat one. During the exploration phase we will have to advance our group through the various scenarios that make up the mission. The movement will be free and it will be possible to occasionally find points of interest, indicated by a magnifying glass, which will be able to reveal some more details on the plot or give us information on the current mission. Unfortunately, the interactivity with the environments ends here. Once we come into contact with hostile elements, we will move on to the turn-based combat phase. In this phase each character (both ally and enemy) has a certain number of action points that can be spent precisely to do things during the turn, move, shoot, use objects or special abilities and so on. In combat it is also very important to take into account the line of sight and the "cone of illumination" or the portion of boxes in which we will be able to clearly distinguish the entity of the enemies we are facing.
The characters will not only have hit points, after which you go KO, but also leadership points, which conditions the skills on the field and stress or sanity, exhausted which will make us fall into confusion or into the most blind madness. The skills of the four characters can be enhanced through experience points that can be spent in a simple, but rather complete skill tree, which are obtained together with the improvement of the characteristics, leveling up like in an RPG. More or less. Equipment can also be improved by equipping the right items that can be found during both main and secondary missions.
Technically Acthung! Cthulhu Tactics comes with more than discrete graphics, even if at times not too fluid and with some not quite perfect animations, and a decidedly high level sound. Really the sound effects are pretty much all spot on and contribute a lot to the overall atmosphere of the game.
From the gameplay side, compared to what we saw in the preview, we would have expected something more. The difficulty of the game, for example, is not set to the best. Many missions and many clashes go by fast without hitches some and then a single skirmish, perhaps not key to the story, is proposed with an exaggerated difficulty, blocking the group unnecessarily for the purposes of the story, and creating a little frustration. After that perhaps, we return to mow down abominations as if nothing had happened. It definitely lacks a bit of balance.
Another flaw is lack of variety. The settings and the opponents that we will find, except for some specific cases, tend to be a bit repetitive, which combined with the nature of the missions (practically all "go from A to B" or "Seek and Destroy") and the almost zero interactivity of the exploratory phases, does not help to get excited about the game.
Acthung! Cthulhu Tactics is a real missed opportunity. The setting and the game base are really very interesting, but the whole is undermined by too many defects to be truly engaging. You can postpone the animations not always at their best, but the excessive linearity (even of the plot, despite the grandiose setting) and the imbalance of difficulty in some points, inexorably pull everything just above the sufficiency. A pity, because the potential was all there.
► Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is an Action-Indie-Strategy-Tactical game developed by Auroch Digital and published by Ripstone Games for PC, PlayStation 4, Steam and Xbox One, the video game was released on 04/10/2018
