When comparing X-COM: UFO Defense vs Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, the Slant community recommends X-COM: UFO Defense for most people. In the question“What are the best Turn-Based Tactics games on Steam?” X-COM: UFO Defense is ranked 13th while Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose X-COM: UFO Defense is:
Keeping track of more than a dozen soldiers with 10 skills, their inventories (including ammo count and weight), dynamic visibility, line of sight, destructible terrain, consequences of missed shots (like friendly fire or destroyed loot), etc. quickly overwhelms noobies, putting the real strategy masters in the limelight. And this is just a battle out of many, with base building, personell management, logistics, reconnaissance, research and manufacturing between them.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very deep strategy
Keeping track of more than a dozen soldiers with 10 skills, their inventories (including ammo count and weight), dynamic visibility, line of sight, destructible terrain, consequences of missed shots (like friendly fire or destroyed loot), etc. quickly overwhelms noobies, putting the real strategy masters in the limelight. And this is just a battle out of many, with base building, personell management, logistics, reconnaissance, research and manufacturing between them.
Pro Active open source clone
The openxcom team have re-implemented the entire game and fixed many of the longstanding bugs in the original. It allows you to play on modern machines and in much higher resolution. A copy of the original game is still required for the assets.
Pro Dark humor
Seems to have started the "evil aliens" trend.
Pro Requires good planning
Each character in the game has a set amount of action points meaning the player needs to tally how much it would take to move and then use a weapon when deciding on where to place each of their characters. this requires careful planning and makes for fun strategy focused gameplay.
Cons
Con Artwork
The artwork is not to everyone's liking.
Con Individual characters much more important
While gameplay-wise this is very similar, there are mission fail-states if core characters die, meaning you don't get quite the same meat-grinder recruitment as in the X-COM/XCOM games.