Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics by Ripstone is a turn-based tactics game similar to Xcom 2. It takes place in an alternate version of WWII where the Nazis are able to summon demons and other supernatural beings and a team of 4 specialists is sent in to stop them.
The main gameplay takes place on a square grid with tiles next to obstacles providing cover from fire in that direction. Unlike Xcom 2, the amount of accuracy reduction provided by cover is fixed.
Like many games, this game has a ‘fog of war’ that blocks out the parts of the level the characters can’t see. To account for what they can hear, there is a grey area around the part of the map you can see, but firing on anything in the grey area incurs a penalty to your chance of hitting the target. One thing this game does, which I found rather interesting, is that if none of your characters have seen an enemy in the grey area, their appearance will be replaced by a silhouette. I found this to be a nice touch as most enemies don’t give themselves away by sound alone (though there are some exceptions to this, acknowledged by the fact that you can still identify some of the larger enemies by their silhouette alone).
You start the game with 4 named characters. Each of these characters can equip items, gain experience, level up, and acquire skills by spending gained experience points. Each of the characters has a different set of skills and access to different types of weaponry which makes them feel somewhat unique. I wish there were more named characters, but these 4 are the only named characters you get. You can use temporary characters if any of the 4 named characters gets captured, but the temporary characters don’t have any skills and are generally weaker.
The characters you control have a health meter, a ‘luck’ meter, action points, and a panic level. A character’s ‘luck’ meter acts as a shield meter of sorts, that is to say, that you can only take damage from an attack once your ‘luck’ runs out. If one of your characters runs out of health, they will be incapacitated. If they are left incapacitated in the grey area for too long, they will be captured. You can reclaim captured characters by completing a side mission.
Action points dictate how many actions you can take with a character in one turn. Different actions cost different amounts of action points. For example, moving is dependent on how far the character moves while firing a shot is priced by how powerful the attack. By default all your characters start their turn with 12 action points, but various factors can decrease this.
There is also a shared team meter known as the ‘momentum’ meter. Points from this meter can be used to fuel certain actions when a character runs out of action points. Some actions, usually special attacks, can only be fueled by this meter. The meter starts with some points at the beginning of every turn and gains a point every time one of your characters lands a critical hit.
A character’s panic level rises every time a teammate gets hit by an attack. When the meter fills up, the character will take an action without your input, usually with a detrimental effect (not to mention it wastes the amount of action points they will have the next turn). I found the panic system somewhat annoying as any hit, no mater how small, could raise the panic level of all your other characters.
This would usually result in all your characters being freaked out multiple times by the game’s 4th mission. While other similar games also have a panic level for your characters, those games at least limit panic-inducing events to things that would cause panic, like seeing a teammate die or suffering a nasty hit. Aside from how annoying the penalty is for something that seemed to occur all the time, it is also immersion-breaking. Aren’t these characters supposed to be experts that deal with this kind of stuff all the time? If they are going into combat—where they are guaranteed to get hit—they shouldn’t be bothered by missed shots and glancing blows.
Another thing I found annoying was how often the enemy would reposition themselves. As opposed to other similar games where enemies only reposition if they are flanked or if they can reach a point for a better shot, in this game the enemies would reposition if any of your characters were able to see them. Most often they would retreat which would force me to chase them halfway across the map, using up so much of my characters’ action points in the process that they wouldn’t have enough points to shoot that turn once they caught up. It would be one thing if the enemies did this every now and again to lure aggressive players into a trap, but enemies seemed to do this all the time, even in the game’s opening levels levels.
Overall, while I found the game’s story and characters to be interesting, the panic problem and the fact that enemies reposition way too frequently ruined the experience for me. Still, what was outside those issues worked, so I think a fair rating would be 6/10.
Check Out the Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics Nintendo Switch Launch Trailer:
For more information, visit the Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics webpage on the Ripstone website: achtung.ripstone.com.
Nintendo Switch Review
I am a recent Computer Science/Game Development Programming Chapman University Graduate. I am a life long enthusiast of computer/video gaming and my favorite game genres are adventure, choice-driven stories, fighting, and racing. My favorite game/movie series include but aren't limited to 'Legend of Zelda'; 'Dragon Age'; 'Persona'; 'Sonic the Hedgehog'; 'Mario'; 'Metroid' ;'Megaman'; 'Naruto'; 'Batman'; 'Spiderman'; 'Star Wars'; and 'Star Trek.'
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