The editorial pages of the New York Times and other papers are riddled with thinkpieces wondering: Is it ever okay to punch a Nazi? To that, I’d add, is it okay to punch a Nazi when they’re summoning up interstellar horrors that drive men mad? Shouldn’t we just have a reasonable discussion as adults and come to some middle ground?
Developer: Auroch Digital
Price: $24.99
Platform: PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
MonsterVine was supplied with PC code for review
Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics answers this question with a resounding “No!” There is no “have a reasonable discussion where we can come to an agreement” option, nor is there a “debate the Nazi/horror from beyond our dimension” option, which may be a major oversight if you’re centrist.
On the other hand, shooting Nazis is cool and good, especially if they’re summoning eldritch horrors, so I say: play on. Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is based on a the tabletop RPG (named Achtung! Cthulhu, naturally) encouraging pulp two-fisted Nazi-punching storylines, with a splash of Lovecraftian horror.
Nazi dabblings in the occult have gained them terrifying Lovecraftian monsters, which means the Americans and British are pursuing their own arcane magical research as a counter. All of this is very Top Secret, which means when a commando team investigating a secret weapons facility is wiped out, only a small party of highly-trained operatives can go in to investigate, and that’s where we come in.
Think XCOM with a few twists. You control a small party of highly-skilled combatants trying to shoot your way through enemies ranging from your basic Nazi goon to highly-skilled snipers to sorcerers to shoggoths.
Downside: That’s about it for enemies. There’s only a few enemy types and once you know their gimmicks, it’s pretty easy to plow through them. I also used “party” in the RPG sense. There’s none of the squad or base management of XCOM. You’re going to control the same four operatives through most of the game and while they do have some progression, they’re pretty well slotted into their intended roles. If someone gets captured, there are redshirts or other operatives that can slot in for a rescue mission (a nice touch), but there’s no way to progress them, build a B-team, or tune things the way you like. This takes away from a lot of the gun of these types of games. Squad management, learning when to risk a newbie or veteran operative, and team-building are all major and enjoyable portions of tactics games. Removing it simplifies the game, but takes out a lot of the fun. For me, I’m the kind of dork that plays Out of the Park Baseball, so not being able to manage my team is pure torture.
Gameplay also handles a lot like an RPG, specifically an isometric RPG in the Baldur’s Gate mode. Your party appears on a map, you explore the map until you uncover enemies or objectives, then we kick it into turn-based tactical combat. The combat is about what you’d expect, taking turns to make your moves and fire, then the other side does its thing, repeat.
There’s a couple twists. “Luck” is for all practical purposes plot armor. Since everyone’s using firearms (or magical weapons) that are pretty lethal, “Luck” soaks up that one-shot instakill that ruins your whole day. However, it does an excellent job of making you feel like you’re running an elite team. A bunch of generic goons aren’t going to overrun you unless you’re having a bad day, but you do have to be careful when the plot armor wears off.
Momentum is a little harder to describe, but it can be used for special abilities and is a reward for doing well on a roll. It’s also handy for things like sidearms and secondary weapons, which means fewer of those “I just ran into an enemy with my face but can’t shoot it” situations. It’s also set up so you can’t use Overwatch to cheese your way through levels as much as in XCOM.
One of the problems with combat–as well as with non-combat–is that the maps are relatively tiny. While flanking and cover are in, there’s usually 1 or 2 ways through a situation and those are pretty obvious. There’s not a lot of exploration or wandering around scavenging for stuff or, for that matter, trying to find the right position to set up a shot or flank a squad.
There are bonus objectives on the map but since there’s no overview map that I could find or any indicators aside from stumbling on them, they’re not exactly compelling. You mean I left one stone unturned that could be basically anywhere assuming I can remember the map? Cool story, bro.
It’s usually easy to tell when a fight is coming. The old gag about “I wonder what’s going to happen since there are a lot of medpacks and ammo here and the music changed!” easily applies. Suddenly there are a lot of walls and handy defensive positions that would be an excellent place for a fight. And sometimes the fight music scripting fires before your troops have formally detected the enemy, which makes it that much easier to guess. It can feel a bit like a puzzle game where you’re just trying to solve a map instead of trying to run a small squad, though the occasional Naked Gun-esque situation where two guys on the opposite side of a waist-high wall can’t hit each other is amusing at least.
The AI is…there. It’s…okay. I mean, it can be a challenge to overcome, but it definitely doesn’t use its units well or mix things up at all. And it can frequently do baffling things. Like I just revived that guy and you have a full strength commander standing in front of him, why are you not killing him? Where are you going?
I should also mention the voice acting, which I don’t think they always got right. Sometimes your dude shouts “I’m hit!” then the same voice shouts “I got him!” as if he’s shooting himself. And sometimes it seems like they didn’t use German accents for the Germans, which is an interesting choice.
Instead of a campaign along the lines of an XCOM or Jagged Alliance, there’s a main storyline and side missions. The story missions tell the main story and side missions give you a little more XP and gear. So you’d be an idiot not to do the side missions. So why are they even side missions? There’s also no difficulty indicator or way to tell how hard it’s going to be, but that probably doesn’t matter when you can’t change your squad around much anyway.
The Final Word
Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is a beer-and-pretzels tactical game. It’s not hard or demanding. It’s more like a puzzle game than something like Final Fantasy Tactics, so if the sort of all-consuming 80+ hours of gameplay behemoths seem a little much, it’s a nice way to get a similar experience or see if you even like the genre before plunging into XCOM But With Mods To Make It Even More Of A Grind. It’s not a bad way to get some Nazi punching in, but a good campaign mode or some squad management would’ve made it so much more.
MonsterVine Review Score: 3 out of 5 – Average
