Robert D. Anderson & the Legacy of Cthulhu review

Dec 18, 2007

If a work is created from within the fandom, then surely that mixture of expertise, passion and knowledge will craft a masterpiece, right? Some hope. But that’s unfair, because this Lovecraft-derived storyline of an investigator who descends into madness is fairly engrossing. Still, the writers probably should have got pros to design the game itself, because the storytelling is interspersed with some of the most bitterly tedious FPS sections ever devised.

Pick out any 10-year-old FPS from your collection, turn the specs down low, replace your mouse’s ball with a chestnut shell, shove a knitting needle through your brain and you’ve got Legacy of Cthulhu. It’s been pieced together using the commercial FPS Creator software, which is your first clue that this isn’t going to rival Crysis (which is just as well, as it couldn’t be less interested in running properly on Vista). Considering how fearsomely basic this all is, some seriously bum coding must have been at work to make things run this jerkily, to speak nothing of the five-minutes-plus loading times. There's a patch that claims to alleviate the load times, but that won't stop the game from being a busted mess.