New Rule (Cranfield, Birmingham)

New rule: check your bags.

For years I've been wheeling a carry-on secure in the knowledge I can get off the plane straight away and walk out of the airport. I avoid paying the fee of [whatever it may be]. Score! So clever am I!

This was a good rule. Then everyone started following it. This trip to the UK started with a mad scramble to get everyone's bags in the overhead. I genuinely thought someone might die, probably one of the flight attendants from an aneurism. We left a few minutes behind schedule; by the grace of God it wasn't much more than half an hour. Opening the containers up again was like Russian roulette with carry-ons. That's before you consider that for a lot of folks it wasn't carry-ons; it was duty free, it was duffle bags, it was this, it was that, but it wasn't the standard size bag. Which makes a huge difference when the overheads can only take two or three standard size.

No, no. Never again. I'm going to get a larger bag (because why not) and whenever I fly long haul, that bag gets checked. I don't care if the airline charges me. It is worth the cost to avoid the pain. Short haul is different. If I'm only going to be out of country for a few days, it makes sense to use a smaller bag. But long haul, with a larger bag, I can carry more books. Which are duty free. Alleluia!

Now, the conventions. 

Chaosium UK was an eye-opener. I'd forgotten how desolate UK villages can be; there's nothing in Cranfield beyond a couple pubs, a chippie, a Chinese, and one decent restaurant. Allegedly decent. I never saw it because it wasn't in walking distance and Cranfield's Uber drivers are double-charging weasels.  

I tell you, these places are deserts where you park your 2.4 kids until they're old enough to feck off to uni. I cannot imagine living there. You'd start to see the walls move in and out after a while. Which is very odd, for a university village. I can only think the students make their own fun. Or get the hell out to Milton Keynes as soon as possible, but that would involve functional public transport or a willingness to get robbed blind by the aforementioned Uber weasels.

Cranfield School of Management was great and the staff did their best, though I did feel as if I'd gone back in time and was a student again. At least this time the bar had a decent selection of non-alcoholic beer! Food was British Stodge, and while I do not mind a bit of Stodge I can't imagine living on the bloody stuff. You'd need a cast iron stomach and the epicurean incuriousness of a billy goat.

Another thing I had forgotten: UK cons are mostly about gaming. I've become used to the North American version, where there's a much larger vendor presence, film, guests, panels, the whole schmeer. As a result I didn't sign up for anything like as much gaming as I could have, though I did enjoy dipping into a Rivers of London game, Route 66, and was able to sit in on the start of a Jimmy's Last Dance session. Plus, Miskatonic Playhouse! Ahh, fun times. I did spend money. One of these days I should also claim the .pdf version of some of those games I bought. I tell you, it's easy to get sidetracked in a dozen different directions if you're not careful.

Then there was the Birmingham Expo. 

Yes, there is a vendor presence at the Expo. However did you guess?

One thing Birmingham does not know how to deal with: heat. It was baking in there. Thank God it was high ceilings at the Expo centre for the heat to bleed out or I think there would have been a couple heatstroke cases.

I went to one panel - Off With Your Head, a ton of fun, my allegiance remains with King Non-Copyright Mouse - in something called Piazza Five, which is a tiny brick oven at the heart of the Expo centre. I think I caught a breath of fresh air once, briefly, at the start of the show, when the aircon wrote its will and collapsed. I was in the front row, because I like to be in the splash zone. If someone on stage spontaneously combusted and burnt to ashes on the spot, I would not have been surprised. Credit to Sam See, the Vizier and Master of Ceremonies. He did not wilt. Which must have been a temptation.

For the love of God, put in more water stations at least, inside the halls. Better yet functional HVAC, but water stations, por favor. 

Books!

Where did I go? Foyles, of course. Rare Books & Curios, Greenwich Market. Henry Pordes on Charing Cross, The Bookshop on the Heath (an old favorite), Criminally Good Books in York. Plus a side trip to the bookstalls outside Southbank BFI.

What did I get?

Yellow Kid Weil: the autobiography of America's Master Swindler.  I knew I had to have this the second I saw it. Read it before two days passed. This is one of those must-haves for anyone who delights in crime, the Roaring Twenties, or both.

Coming Up For Air, George Orwell. I haven't cracked this one yet but I'm looking forward to it. A nostalgia tour of the world before the Great War. 1960s paperback reprint of the 1939 original.

Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, edited and rewritten by Charles Dickens. I love the stage and I admire Dickens' writing style. I haven't finished this one yet but am working on it. My God, Grimaldi had a punishing father. 

Death In Captivity. Michael Gilbert. Chewed this down within a day. A prisoner is found dead inside a second world war internment camp. Why was he killed? Who's responsible?

Crook O'Lune, E.C.R. Lorac. A remote farmhouse is set ablaze and a woman dies of smoke inhalation. Why do this? Is it to distract attention from sheep smuggling or is there something more sinister at root?

Impact of Evidence, Carol Carnac A car wreck in the Welsh Borders kills a retired doctor, and a second body is found. Who's the extra dead man? Why was he in the doctor's car?

Both these last are technically cozy crime, but they're as far from cozy as it is possible to get. Ate these within 24 hours of purchase.

Deadly Dolls: Midnight Tales of Uncanny Playthings, short story collection. Because how could I resist? Bought on the Saturday, finished same day. Highly recommended to horror fans, there are some interesting pieces here you won't see elsewhere.

Farmer Giles of Ham, J.R.R. Tolkien. See, this is why you go to places like the BFI bookstalls. Lovely little 1979 imprint of the 1949 original. I've read this before. it was a treat to read it again.

The Chinese Nail Murders and The Phantom of the Temple, both Robert Van Gulik, both BFI bookstalls. Lovely 1960s Panther paperbacks. I've a lot of time for Van Gulik. He tackles his subject with aplomb. I look forward to reading these.

She Walks At Night, Seiko Yokomizo. Pretty sure I picked this up at Foyles the first day I was there. Brilliant stuff, with an ending that subverts all that has come before.

Suspicion and Inspector Imanishi Investigates, both Seicho Matsumoto, bought at Heathrow Airport. Because all the other books were in my case and that had been checked in. Finished Suspicion as I was waiting to board the plane.  

Film! Yes, I did buy some blu-ray, mostly from the BFI but also from Fopp. Which, you ask?

Well!

Night of the Comet

Black Lagoon

Gremlins

Gremlins 2

 

BFI Classic Ghost Stories

As for the RPG stuff, that can wait another week.

See you soon!

Not Quite Review Corner: Invisible Inc (Klei)

Welcome to another installment, in which I'm going to talk about Klei Entertainment's stealthy roguelike, Invisible Inc. I just picked this up on Steam yesterday, and have been playing obsessively for the last few hours. I haven't beaten it yet (experienced level), but I am on what seems to be the final mission, and am playing through again with different characters to see if that has significant effect on my playthrough.

The story campaign is set in a William Gibson-esque cyberpunk world, and I'll go so far as to say that, unless you've been devouring cyberpunk for the last few years, many of the game concepts might confuse or irritate you. Corporations rule this dystopian world. Your rag-tag bunch of crooks and thieves has been a thorn in their side for far too long, so the corps decided to band together to take you out. Your organization is shattered, many of its members captured, and you're on the run with what's left of your super-powerful AI, Incognita. Your job is to stay alive, and find somewhere to house your AI before it degrades beyond recovery.

Incognita is one of the major gameplay elements. It's thanks to the AI that you can hack your way through the enemy defenses, and without hacking your team would be dead in the water, since the corp facilities are chock-full of security cameras, laser beams, security drones, combat drones and other, terrifying things. Plus, of course, security guards. So, so many security guards ... Your job, ultimately, is to keep Incognita alive, and the story missions revolve around you finding a new home for her, after the old one was blown up.

You begin play with two surviving agents, a small fund of credits, and not much else. The default agents are Decker, a thug with a handy-dandy invisibility cloak, and Internationale, a clever hacker who can rip systems apart wirelessly. Of the two, Internationale is probably the more useful, since Incognita needs Power to operate, and Internationale can steal that quickly and easily. There are other agents which you can unlock through play, or rescue from detention camps. Some are combat monsters, others stealthy thieves. Though each has a personality of sorts, it barely impinges on gameplay. Apart from individual character's special abilities, like Decker's chance to detect internet Daemons, each character is the same as another, increases abilities in the same way, and uses the same equipment. There are no character classes here. If you want Internationale to become a brawler, a brawler she shall be, and so on.

This is a turn-based stealth roguelike, with STEALTH writ in ten-foot high fiery letters. If stealth games frustrate you, on no account go anywhere near Invisible Inc. In many ways it's the polar opposite of XCom, despite both being turn-based strategy titles, because one of the draws of XCom is that you get to shoot, blow up and otherwise shred the things that anger you, whereas here you need to adapt to your environment, avoiding conflict if at all possible. Dishonored, another stealth title, also allowed the player to choose to blow off steam, and complete the mission, by killing everything in sight, waving a sword like Doug Fairbanks on amphetamines. Here, though, killing or indeed any aggressive action is tacitly forbidden. Each time a guard dies, or wakes up after you've knocked him unconscious, things get much more difficult, as the alarm bells start ringing and the surviving guards chase you down. At alarm level one, things are a little tricky, but at level six you might as well get in your coffin and call the undertaker.

This is a difficult game. I strongly recommend new players start at Beginner, and work your way up. Ordinarily the lowest rung of the difficulty ladder is for those who've never played this kind of game before, but this time, it's for everyone. Particularly since the game's stuffed full of concepts and terminology that aren't as clearly described as perhaps they could be. Again, it's a cyberpunk thing; especially when it comes to the hacking side of the game, you really need to be into the genre to get, say, Daemons, and how they can screw with your day. But it's also because there's a ton of stuff to take in, very little of which is going to be familiar to you.

For example: there's something called a Sound Bug on many of the levels. Presumably it's some kind of defensive mechanism, a type of trap. I have no idea what this thing does. It hasn't affected my game play - or at least, I haven't noticed it affecting my experience - but I know it's there, and I know it does something.  I've been ignoring it, which seems to work so far. I'd still like to know what it is.

Many of the game's concepts are deliberately video-gamish, which can be annoying. Case in point: if you hack some of the consoles on the level, you get the option to buy new programs or tools to help you out. Think about it: you've just hacked, as in gained illicit access, to their systems. You should have complete control, so why are you spending money, your own actual cash, to do stuff? Do Chinese hackers rip apart, I don't know, Amazon, say, just so they can purchase books on Kindle? Or here's another: many of the advanced weapons require ammo packs, one-time-use items, so they can be recharged. I assumed that meant if you wanted to reload during a mission, you had to have an ammo pack. Fine, but if I empty a weapon and then finish the mission, I can reload for free at home base, right? We have bullets stashed away at HQ, surely? No? I have to use the one-use-only item that cost me several hundred credits - again, my own money, because my hacker's a bit fuzzy on the whole stealing thing - to recharge? Damn. There is a story element that explains this - you're flying around on an escape jet, and didn't have a chance to bring supplies - but it still smacks of resource management shoehorned in to make the experience more difficult.

It's not as if you can get stuff easily. There is an in-game merchant, Monst3r, but he rarely has anything to sell, in story mode at least. You can buy things from corp machines, but there's no guarantee that the corp machine will have what you want, and of course you're dodging corp security all the time, so you can't hang around. That one-use-only item can't get replaced easily, so you have to be really, really careful, husbanding your resources.

It is basically Ironman by default, unless you're playing at Beginner level. Ironman, for those not familiar with the term, is a game concept which assumes that you cannot go back to a previous save, and play again. Every choice counts. At Beginner, you have the option of Rewinding, going back in time one turn, which you can do five times. You also have the option to restart the level, which is great when you thoroughly screw the pooch and are facing down a dozen enraged guards. At Experienced, you can no longer restart, nor can you go back to a previous save, and you only have three Rewinds. Thus, while not officially Ironman, Experienced forces you to play with no take-backs, and if the mission goes straight to hell, that's the entire campaign done and dusted, with all your people dead or in custody. You don't have the option to choose who goes on a mission. The game assumes everyone goes, so if you fail and your people are wiped, there's no way to recover. Ouch! I haven't dared try anything above Experienced yet. I think it might make me cry.

Is this a good strategy title? Hell yes. You will sweat over every single decision. When you manage a successful run, sneaking through the facility and stealing what you need to survive, escaping right under the enemy's nose, you'll feel like the hero of a heist movie. The roguelike aspect of it makes it feel a little as if the corp's architects drink a bucket of scotch for breakfast, lunch and dinner - seriously guys, corridors that go nowhere, what the hell - but it does mean that the maps have near infinite variety, which really keeps you on your toes.

Has it the same replayability as XCom? Well, it does have sandbox modes for you to tool around in, after the story mode's done. You could build up a team of hardened crooks and make the corps sweat blood, forever and ever and ever. XCom doesn't offer that, and its lack of new maps does make it feel same-y after a while. Even if a roguelike's maps look as if they were put together by Salvador Dali's cousin Sherman, at least they're different each time.

However there's not a lot of actual variety in the missions. Ultimately you go to a place, do a thing, and then run away. The thing you do can vary from hacking into a system, buying new stuff, capturing enemy personnel for the information in their heads and so on, but the mechanics of it never change significantly. Whenever you do a thing, alarm bells go off, making it that much more difficult to escape. No matter how you handle the capture of a corporate officer, for instance, in hope of stealing his data card, he always, always, always summons a high-level security guard to investigate. No matter how stealthy you have been, the alarm bells always go off, and the level of alarm always increases. It doesn't matter how clever you are, if you're still there when the alarm level reaches six - and it will get there eventually - you're borked. All this can make the game feel as if you're doing the same rote task, time and again, and it's mainly the adrenaline rush of avoiding the security systems that keeps you hooked.

Is it worth the money? It's currently going for $17.99 on Steam, and is also available on Mac and PS4. Not sure of the price tag on the other platforms, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it's broadly comparable. At that price, it's a steal. Even if you fall out of love with it eventually, it will consume many hours of your time before that happens.

Do I recommend it? Yes, but with the great big caveat that you have to like stealth games, and must be big into cyberpunk as a setting. It is not a game for hotheads, and if you lose your temper easily, avoid like the plague.

But all that said, if you do love stealth, if you're familiar with cyberpunk as a setting, and if you're looking for a turn-based strategy title to take over where XCom left off, look no further. Klei has you covered.

Enjoy!

Not Quite Review Corner: Boom Beach (iOS, Android)

Boom Beach is something I hadn't heard of, even though it's been out for a year, until one of its cheerful adverts caught my eye. I've been playing this freemium app for about a week now, and the excitement hasn't begun to pall. It's one of my new obsessions, which I hope to pass on to you.

Boom Beach takes place in a massive archipelago, populated mostly by tiny villages. You command a mercenary band whose objective is to bring the archipelago under your control. Technically the game describes this as 'free the enslaved villages' but I can't help but notice that, as soon as the villagers are freed, they start paying you tribute, making this less about freeing the oppressed and more about 'new boss, same as the old boss'. In order to do this, you control an attacking force which you can send out via landing craft to the other islands, invading up the beach, smashing the enemy defenses, and blowing up the enemy's HQ. The HQ is the most important building on the map; destroy that and you've won the battle, but don't think for a moment that it'll be easy!

The cartoonish not-quite-Second-World-War visual aesthetic is a lot of fun, and though it's all about combat it's pretty bloodless, which means you don't have to worry about younger gamers getting an eyeful of viscera. Mechanically the controls are very simple. You have no direct control over your troops once they land, so they tend to head straight for the nearest target and shoot it up. Once battle begins, your main means of controlling the situation is from the gunboat offshore, which can fire flares to direct your troops where they need to be, use healing medkits to keep them upright, fire artillery shells on enemy positions to weaken them before the troops get there, and so on. The more experience you get, the more things the gunship can do, but it's powered by energy, which is refreshed only when your troops blow up buildings. This makes each battle an interesting mix of strategy versus utility. Do you send a flare to your troops sending them off to an undefended section of the map, so they can blow up buildings there, thus powering up the gunship which can fire off artillery at something dangerous? Do you head straight for the HQ, therefore not blowing up stuff, therefore not powering up the gunboat? Choices, choices ...

Your main NPC opponent is the Blackguard, a fiendish gang of ruffians dressed in Nazi black who run a series of bases all over the map. Destroy the base and the villagers who live there are free, free to give you all their money and send off tribute every few hours. Ahem. Your initial boss enemy is Hammerman, whose bases are very well defended, but the loot once you beat his pointy head in is phenomenal. Later you'll face off against more difficult boss enemies, but Hammerman's the NPC who'll dominate your early game experience.

Or you could just sally forth and destroy other players' bases, stealing their gold and raw materials. No damage is permanent, so if you blow up half a dozen of another player's buildings they all get rebuilt for no cost after the attack's over. You'll be very grateful for this when someone invades your base and reduces it to rubble!

Speaking of your own island, what if someone raids it, blowing up your HQ and stealing your stuff? You have a range of defensive options, such as the sniper tower, flamethrower, mines, machine gun nest, mortar, cannons and so forth. Again, the more experienced you become, the more options unlock, but each option needs raw materials both to build and upgrade it. The basic raw material is wood, used to build all the low-level gear. Then there's stone, then metal, each of which is progressively more difficult to obtain. Level one defensive buildings won't be able to cope with experienced attackers, so you need to keep upgrading constantly. In addition to the raw materials, each building takes time both to construct and upgrade; at the beginning this might be just ten minutes or so, but soon it's an hour, then two or three hours, and so on.

This is where the freemium bit comes in. The game's special currency is diamonds, which can be used both to buy raw materials and, more importantly, to speed up the building process. Spend diamonds, and that cannon which might take half a day to build is done in less time than it takes to type this sentence. Spend enough diamonds, and your entire base can be fully upgraded, ready to hold off even the most determined opponent.

While freemium is a problem for many people, I have to say I haven't found it to be so here. The big problem with freemium is that the developers often restrict the flow of the premium currency, making it difficult to proceed without spending money. The Simpsons Tapped Out is a prime example of this; it runs on doughnuts, which are almost impossible to find through gameplay, and since many buildings and important characters can only be unlocked by spending doughnuts, the player feels almost obliged to spend money. Not so here. Diamonds can be found in the wild, and can also be unlocked through completing achievements, making it relatively easy to collect a whole bunch without spending a dime.

Play style may also be a factor. This isn't a title you can sink hours at a stretch into; Boom Beach is something you pick up, play for fifteen or twenty minutes, then put down again. Perfect for a smoke break or a quick bash at lunch, but of course in the time in between, when you're not actively playing, you can be quietly upgrading your sniper tower, or whatever else needs doing. So long as you're happy with that, Boom Beach is for you, but if you demand hours at a time from your mobile app then you might get a little frustrated.

I'd recommend this to any gamer looking for a quick strategy experience. It's fun enough for a few minutes at a time, with just enough complexity in it to keep your brain working without overtaxing it. It's not for anyone looking for a complicated strategy experience, or who's hoping for a title that will occupy a lot of their time. It's also not for people who hate to lose. Your troops will get shot up, your base will be raided, your gold stolen, resources nicked. So what? It's only stuff, stuff you didn't pay for, and which you nicked off someone else. Don't get mad. Get even!

Incidentally if you should become a Boom Beach player and happen to come across a charming fellow called Spanky Burn, that's me. I love you, you love me, but stay orf moi laaaand!

Not Quite Review Corner: XCOM Enemy Within

Yes, I write for the Escapist; no, this has nothing to do with the Escapist.

Firaxis' XCOM Enemy Within is conquering the gaming world, and with good reason. It's a fun title, a worthy successor to XCOM Enemy Unknown, and if you're a fan of strategy games it's well worth your time. That said, there's one big problem: bugs.

I'm not talking about the Sectoids, Thin Men and other aliens who've arrived on spaceships to enslave humanity. I'm talking about game breakers; bugs that crash the game, and destroy any chance of completing the level. I've just finished a round where I had to abandon mid-match, because the AI refused to believe I'd won. All the Sectoids had been shot, bar one, who happened to be standing next to a car when it exploded. Except the game didn't recognize the exploded Sectoid, and because it didn't the only other way to finish the match was to abort the mission, giving up all the rewards I'd fought for. It's also crashed to desktop at least four or five times for reasons unknown, and one particular EXALT mission has a nasty habit of not activating once you reach a certain checkpoint. Trouble is, if it doesn't activate then you can't complete, and as this is a story mission, not just some random match, you really don't want to abort. 

All of which will be very frustrating if, like me, you play Ironman, a game variant where every death is permanent and you can't restart from a previous save. At least three Ironman games had to be dropped because of that EXALT mission bug.

Now the bad part's out of the way, let me talk about the good.

XCOM, for those not familiar with the series, takes place in a near future Earth, which has been invaded by aliens. Nobody knows why they're here or how many of them are out there, and it's your job, as Commander of the elite special forces unit XCOM, to sort things out. You have at your disposal the best of the best, who'll research things for you, build things for you, and go out into the wide world and shoot things for you. The heart of the game is that last bit, where you guide your troops across the battlefield, looking for aliens to shoot and special rewards, like Meld, to collect.

Your first few missions are fairly simple, which is good news, as your base needs work and your soldiers are inexperienced numbskulls who can't hit the broad side of a barn. Over time, as you gather more materials, collect Meld to enhance your troops, autopsy the aliens you shoot, and level up your soldiers, you'll put together a crack force of hardened veterans, build a base filled with laboratories, workshops, and other useful gadgets, all in preparation for the endgame where you track down the alien base and destroy it.

You'll find yourself switching from tactical view to battlefield, eying up the best chances and making swift decisions. Do you intervene in India and stop an alien attack, or is it a better idea to wait and heal your troops? Nigeria, the USA and Japan are all screaming for help, and you have a satellite handy. Do you launch it and pacify one of those three, or save it in case of emergency? Russia's asking for materials from the UFO you just shot down, and promises aid to the project if you comply; is it a good idea, or do you need those materials more than Russia does?

As a tactical wargame experience, there's nothing as good as XCOM. When it works, it's the perfect squad-level game, and there's plenty of mission variety. The UFOs you shoot down need to be searched, alien attacks must be stopped before global panic spreads, the Council of Nations who signs the paychecks demands you do something dangerous in Canada, and so on. Enemy AI is extremely sharp, and will often outwit you if you're not careful. Plus there's an extraordinary variety of opposition out there, from human quislings EXALT to the savage Crysalids, Mutons, and psychic Sectoid Commanders. And that's just scratching the surface.

If it wasn't for the bugs ... I keep coming back to that, because the original game - though it had its faults - wasn't nearly as buggy as this. It's particularly aggravating in Ironman, where you can't take back a mistake. It's one thing to be stymied by your own stupidity, something else when the game smacks you in the face, potentially ruining hours of play.

Even with the bugs, it's getting a recommendation from me. Just don't play it on Ironman, at least not yet. Wait until it gets patched.

That's it for this installment! Next time, something for Night's Black Agents.

 PS: Since I wrote this, I've tried playing straight Classic, no Ironman. That seems to work fine. I haven't had a single crashout or experienced any major bugs. I'm beginning to wonder if this is something that only affects Ironman's save-every-turn function. In any case, I'm sure future patches will solve the problem. 

Shut Up & Sit Down

This is going to be a quick post because I want to talk about something else altogether, but I can't blether about that until I've blethered about this: Shut Up & Sit Down, a boardgame review site run by two guys in the UK, Quinns and Paul. This site is so much fun! Please go over there and give them a bit of your time.

I've loved board games ever since the year dot, but I hardly ever get a chance to play them any more. I lack both time and opponents, but there was a day when something like Knights of the Air, Kremlin or Fury of Dracula consumed hours upon hours upon hours of my free time. I still have all three games knocking around somewhere, but the odds of them ever coming out of the box for a bit of fun are, alas, very low. Watching these two nutbars have a casual meltdown, grins plastered all over their faces, as they get deeply involved in yet another video review is very satisfying.

I will say this: their vids can be a bit too long. They cover a lot of ground, but unless you have half an hour or so spare watching one can feel like a slog, however funny it may be. They seem inclined to switch to a ten-minute format, probably to satisfy their Penny-Arcade audience.  I hope they stick with the shorter shows, as they're much easier to digest in one sitting.

Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land

Call of Cthulhu: Wasted Land is the brainchild of Red Wasp Design, a UK-based game studio. It’s a turn-based strategic skirmish wargame based loosely on the writings of H.P Lovecraft, though its gameplay reminds me more of the X-Com series than it does Call of Cthulhu. I’ve had a lot of fun with it this week!

The year is 1915. The Schlieffen Plan hasn’t worked, and Germany’s advance on Paris has stalled. The trenches that are to become symbolic of the Great War have just been dug, and your main protagonist, Captain Hill, is an ordinary soldier fighting on the Front. A mysterious branch of military intelligence sends a boffin, Professor Brightmeer, to help him root out and destroy a particularly insidious foe: Kaul, a nominal ally of the Germans who is using the carnage for his own ends. Brightmeer is joined soon afterwards by Carl Green, martial arts expert, and Emma Gold, a student of Freud, and they join forces with Hill’s platoon to rid the world of Cthulhoid horrors. Together they advance through No-Man’s-Land, at first gathering clues, trying to fathom Kraul’s plan, and later penetrating the villain’s lair to confront him once and for all.

Wasted Land is a strategy game. Your units (Hill, Brightmeer and their allies) have a certain number of Action Points, which they spend moving from place to place, shooting, or performing other actions.  When their turn is done, the enemy have a go, and then the cycle repeats. The victory condition for the scenario changes each time; your goal could be to survive, or to shepherd Brightmeer to the objective so he can study it or blow it up. Win one scenario and you move to the next, until the end is reached. It’s a pulp-action plot complete with moustache-twirling villain but the writing is entertaining with some nice asides from Cornishman Sid Brown, the artillery spotter whose pigeons helped me out of more than one scrape.

Cthulhu tabletop gamers are known for their love of historical accuracy, and Wasted Land does an excellent job. I only caught one duff note, a reference to Salvador Dali’s artwork when, at the time of the scenario, Dali would have been eleven years old. Otherwise Red Wasp did a good job of tying together their timeline.

Veteran tabletop players may be a little surprised by the emphasis on combat. Generally speaking Call of Cthulhu teaches you to run away from, say, Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath as they’re extremely dangerous and nigh-on impossible to kill. When three of them turned up at once, my immediate reaction was to order my units to flee. What I ought to have done, as I soon discovered, was order my sniper to shoot holes in the lead monster while bringing my martial artist into close range for a few bayonet-hacks. By the time the campaign is over you’ll have depopulated an entire regiment of Dark Young, as well as many other Mythos beasties.

Sanity is another famous Call of Cthulhu mechanic, mental hit points that run out very quickly when your character faces off against horrors from beyond. In Wasted Land you lose Sanity for encountering horrors, but you also lose them each time you attack one, which means if one unit attacks a zombie three times they lose three doses of Sanity, and then they’ll lose more when the zombie attacks them. When Sanity runs out either the unit is paralyzed for a turn and loses all their Action Points, or goes manic. Mania gives them a double dose of Action Points, but at the end of their manic period they’ll fall unconscious and die unless someone helps them. Mania can be a godsend, but when your sniper, heavy weapons guy and martial arts expert all go manic in the same round you do start to feel sorry for the enemy, who’ll be on the receiving end of all that rage.

Sanity can recover naturally after a period of mania or paralysis, but if you want to keep your units in fighting trim then Psychoanalysis will plug those holes in their brains. Gold and Brightmeer start off with this skill, but anyone can learn it. This tends to result in a front line of hardened killers with a support character or two standing directly behind them muttering ‘tell me about your relationship with your mother’ as the undead close in, but needs must!

As a skirmish wargame it has a few flaws, chief among them lack of a Fog of War mechanic. The player always gets to see where everyone is, which does detract from the horror of what is meant to be a horror game. X-Com had this nailed, and it’s a bit puzzling when a series that’s nearly twenty years old has chops that an app released in 2012 doesn’t. The AI sometimes spawns new enemies in inconvenient places, so you can be attacked from the rear while facing off against something nasty, but as a general rule you’ll have plenty of warning of any attack. Most of your opponents are close combat specialists, so your sniper will have a field day as they charge in and your martial artist will enjoy ripping up whatever’s left. This is where Sanity really starts to make a difference, as the last thing you need is a unit in a vital strategic role suddenly lapsing into paralysis.

Another minor gripe is the battlefield itself. It’s beautifully laid out and there are plenty of obstacles, like poison gas or muddy ground, which either slow your units or injure them. However it can be difficult to tell the difference between open ground, which you can shoot over or move through, and an obstacle blocking your line of sight and movement. Level design is also occasionally uninspired, so that what could have been an interesting tangle of barbed wire and poison gas through which you have to choose one of several paths to your objective, becomes instead a linear route the boundaries of which are very clearly marked.   

That said, there were enough challenges here to keep me occupied and I soon learned to tell the difference between terrain types, so my sniper never ended up in a useless location. Though the enemy started to feel slightly outclassed towards the end, the final showdown was appropriately climactic, and were I Field Marshal Haig I’d not have been stingy with the medals afterward!

On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being abysmal and 5 being near-perfect, I’d rate Wasted Land as a solid 3. A Fog of War mechanic would have made this a really great game, but it wasn’t to be. Even so, as a tactical skirmish horror game it works very well, and the atmospheric art design really drives home the feel of being on a Great War battlefield. Here’s hoping Red Wasp come out with a sequel sometime soon!