I've never been a huge Star Wars fan. Saw the original when it came out, loved the first three films, and after that just dropped off the rock. Gameplay-wise, I've never enjoyed shooters and flight sims only interest me if it's Great War biplanes stuff, so the Star Wars franchise never caught my attention.
However, I am an X-Com fan.
When people started describing Zero Company as X-Com but in the Star Wars universe, I was on board.
This isn't Not Quite Review Corner so I shan't go into the bits and bobs, except to say that there isn't as much X-Com here as I'd hoped and the game overall feels as if they had a lot of ideas and not much execution. Plus, for a hero-based game, no romance options, which seems a little boneheaded. Even X-Com's Chimera Squad, which this closely resembles, hinted at relationships between the characters. The closest Zero Company gets to this is Bennic's puppy dog eyes.
The problem with villains is, too often they exist only to do one thing: be foiled by the player characters. Villains are punching bags, paper Nazis, colorful targets that sit on the far end of the shooting range and never shoot back, or at least not accurately. There’s nothing unique about them, nothing that makes the players think ‘I want to know more about this guy.’ If the players don’t feel engaged by the villain, they won’t respect him, and at that point the whole thing falls flat ... Consider this tactic, when designing your own villains. Find out what they want, what they fear people will find out about them, what they’re prepared to kill for.
Zero Company has this problem in spades.
Star Wars in general has a villain problem, to be honest. The setting doesn't have that many honest-to-God villains and, when it finds one, it re-uses that character again and again till whatever personality they once had has lost all meaning.
Fathom is the worst example of this. The definition of a punching bag. I have no idea what she wants or why she wants it. I know she's doing Bad Things and, as the hero of the series, I have a vested interest in stopping Bad Things.
She has subordinates, Cultists. I have no idea what they want. Or why they let themselves get infected with this plague that seems to be the McGuffin of the narrative. It gives them cool powers and cool powers make the world go round, so here we are.
Cults recruit on broadly the same principles as spies. They go MICE - money, ideology, coercion, ego.
Cults, like OPFOR, have the same important characteristics:
Power, appropriate to their function within the narrative.
Goals.
Assets, to be used to achieve their goals.
Let's say for the sake of it that this particular cult got its start in a card game during the Great War.
Six young men sat in a bunker playing cards, waiting for orders. The game intensified. All eyes were on it. The stakes went as high as they possibly could. Then, at the moment of revelation, enemy shelling obliterated the bunker, and only one of those men survives.
That man is convinced that providence spared him only because the game wasn't over, and if it ever ended somehow, at that moment he'd die.
He collected all the playing cards used in the game. The only one missing was one of the aces; he has no idea what happened to it, but he's convinced it's still out there.
That man became the nucleus of a peculiar cult: the Players.
It started within his unit. Just a few listeners to his crazy stories. They didn't take him too seriously, but it was a fun story and he told it well. Then they saw what happened next, how he dodged every bullet, bit of shrapnel or bomb. It was uncanny. Risks that would have killed a normal person, he survived. He started collecting medals, getting promotions. Soon he was in command of the company, and those few listeners stuck to him like glue, certain that whatever luck had attached to him would benefit them too, if they were loyal.
If.
Living can go to your head. A man can be awarded medals, do remarkable deeds, but if there's no moral compass, no center - and in this case whatever was there before soon eroded to nothing - a man can be convinced the world exists to benefit him and him alone.
After the war the hero went home again, followed by a few true believers. Old soldiers convinced their commander could do no wrong, utterly certain that the same luck which dogged his heels in wartime would follow him devotedly in peace.
They were the first Players.
Now the former commander has set up a gambling operation in [select big city]. The Players are part of that operation, all sharing the same Ideology. Others drawn into the cult come in because of Money or Ego. Either they want what the cult seems to have (financial success) or they think they have what it takes to be winners (ego).
The commander has set up a household god totem somewhere in the gambling operation. It might be in his offices or somewhere close by, but it can't be outside the gambling house/casino. The body of this household god is trench art, made of old shell casings and bits of bone. Cordite stench clings to it.
The commander believes he is becoming a vampiric entity and is pondering the utility of blood sacrifice. It's appealing. He has his eye on a couple luscious young things who might do. His reasoning is, it was blood sacrifice that got him this far, but those deaths can only power so much. If there is a way of living forever by consuming the lives of others, well ...
He thinks he has five lives' worth of immortality juice right now: the five who died before that card game ended. But he doesn't know what five lives' worth is, really. Can it be measured in decades, years? Months? Does that mean he can be killed five times before the end and, if so, how many lives did he use up during the War?
The two recruitment vectors are the signature features of the cult: Money, and Ego. In any encounter with the cult or its supporters, those two factors are always evident. They show off all the trappings of wealth, or they inflate the ego of their victims.
The cult's Power comes from money and all that it will buy. It doesn't have legions of soldiers (though its core membership have military experience) and any expertise (safecrackers, pickpockets, card sharps and so on) are hired help. The experts might be seduced into the cult, but they don't start off as recruits nor are they loyal to the commander.
It has a private Goal and a public one.
The private goal is to find a way to turn the commander into a vampire. Not all the Players are briefed on this goal; the commander is keeping it close to the chest. Thefts, research, the hiring of occult experts are all geared towards this private goal.
The public goal is to increase the status of the commander and, by extension, the Players. Political and economic power, mostly. If that means aligning with certain groups (eg. the Fascists) then that's what they will do. This power feeds the household totem, which in turn gives its benefits to the Players, increasing their luck, their ability.
The cult's assets include the gambling house/casino, a host of civilian gamblers and other low-level fodder, the Players (the main core of whom are ex-military) and any experts they might hire with the money the casino generates.
Now, the commander. What does he want, what does he fear people will find out about him, what is he prepared to kill for?
The commander wants immortality. Life is sweet: the War taught him that. He wants it all, every last drop. He likes being in charge of a casino, having loyal followers, and the Players are his friends. He would dispose of it all, including the Players, in a heartbeat if it meant he got to live.
He fears that missing card. It's out there, somewhere. Constant appeals to the household totem have not told him where it is. He fears that someone will find out his weakness, uncover that missing card, and put an end to him by finishing the game. He keeps all the other cards locked away in a safe, and if someone were to steal those cards he would become frantic.
He's prepared to kill for immortality. It doesn't matter who he kills. It could be a baby in the cradle, but if killing that baby would give him even another decade of guaranteed life, he'd slaughter it without a second thought.
I've deliberately not mentioned locations or settings. Obviously, this would work well in a setting after the Great War, so Trail of Cthulhu, Call, Bookhounds and so on, but it could as easily be made to work in a setting outside Earth - Eversink, say. You'd need to change little. Fireballs rather than shellfire, that kind of thing. Or Paris, rather than London, if you'd rather make this Dreamhounds than Bookhounds. Cairo, and make the commander a seeker into Egyptian promises of immortality, for a Tombhounds take.
It's your Cult.
Vitaï Lampada by Sir Henry Newbolt (read by Tom O'Bedlam)
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!
