Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics

X-COM, but WWII allied heroes fighting tentacle nazis, what's there to not like about. That's what I thought when I first installed and booted this game but it soon revealed that there's a lot to not like about. This is hardly a full fledged game. The framework is there, but the amount of content you'll see is very little. Characters: The usual crew of four: stereotypical G.I., female scholar-adventurer, red-beret-ed British officer, and an Indian soldier with otherworldy power for extra diversity. Weapon diversity is VERY limited(for the British, you are not even provided with an alternative choice for your primary), and the most attachments and gears matter little because of the horrible balance. How horribly balanced do you mean? Well, there's this additional mechanic of MP apart from your familiar AP system from the genre. 5 points are given to you every turn by default, and every crit grants you an extra 1 MP. What makes this MP so broken is that using your sidearm doesn't cost any AP, at all. And they still pack a punch, 75% of DMG from your primary weapons like SMGs and Shotguns. They are essentially free attack points. And if you crit, you get your spent point back. Most times, especially against human enemies you rarely have to choose other options to spend those points. As you progress, you'll get even more chances to use this system in your favor. Two pistoleers can get trained to use Double Tap skill, which costs 1 MP to use but hitting either of two shots refunds your spent point anyway and with a chance of crits it doubles your attack chances and provides you with more potential points you'll earn. For the other two, they can learn a skill to earn 1 guaranteed MP for every kill they perform, meaning finishing off low-HP enemies with them is yet another opportunity to earn MPs and yes, another attack chance for your gunslingers. It's impossible for the dev team to not know about this. This is not some exploit I took advantage of; This is just how the game is built. And they tried to balance out the overpowered nation of our heroes by... unleashing a horde of enemies. Enemies that exist in this game can be categorized into 3 different groups. One. typical nazis. They are bullet fodders with pathetically low HPs you can pick off in a fairly quick manner. But despite this, they are designed to act as primary attackers in the game. Two. enhanced nazis. They are the ones armed with hyperadvanced technologies and high HPs. They exist to rush to your location and cast a debuff that will halve affected heroes' APs and reduce defense stats so can the first group can hit their targets more easily. Three. Bullet sponges. Nazi wolverine claws gladiators and shoggoths fell into this category. They can only do melee attacks and their sole purpose is to waste your attack chances and to distract you from above two groups of enemies by having a lot of hit points. Your typical battle will follow this principle: first. A mix of group 1&2 rushes into the battlefield. Because of group 2's nature, they will oftentimes find no cover and rush straight into your line of fire. They are dealt accordingly shortly after. With no debuffs to depower your overpowered band of chads group 1 meets the same fate next few turns. Next, a group of sluggish shaggoths will join the battle but there's no one left to support them so what follows is just a repetition of shoot shoot shoot. Some battles may switch and fiddle around these three stages a bit but they will all feel the same because enemies in this game are designed to be a threat only when they work together and they rarely do. So you do 22 sameish missions(11 main + 11 optional side missions), and the scary final boss you find is just some Tiger tank with a lot of black goo inside. It has a special gimmick of using battlefield pickup Panzerfaust to break its armor in the initial stages but apart from it the battle goes the exact same way. And the ending you get is another teaser, about how this everything was just a start and etcetra etcetera. They are selling this for $25. Now i wouldn't mind much if this was one of those old bundled-with-the-physical-toys-games(they used to do that a lot) but it's hard for me to consider this as a standalone game. Game's more heavily leaned towards to act a paid ad for their tabletop figurines and rulebooks. 3/10.