This is what turned me off, ultimately, from running it. I don’t fantasize about heroes saving the world via superior firepower.
I'm OK with it provided that the set pieces are good, it fits the genre, and the setting isn't fighting against that as hard as it can. It's not a fun story if Indiana Jones goes to Cairo and is arrested by customs as a foreigner carrying a revolver into the local jurisdiction.
The story set up by "Masks" seems to demand as a rational response a military response. The team is better off as commandos or foreign agents not as detectives, antiquarians and archeologists.
Is Two-Headed Serpent actually an exception?
No, but the set pieces are just a ton better and the mix of investigation and pulp action works better for me and the narrative twists are just so much better. For example, one of the first set pieces occurs in the middle of a warzone with heavy weaponry scattered over the remains of a battlefield, and at the same time features a Cthulhu monster that you can't just take down by pumping bullets into it. To me "Two Headed Serpent" is everything that Masks should have been, but unfortunately if you want a non-pulp globe hopping campaign for antiquarians, detectives, and archaeologists solving problems that can't be solved by gunplay and martial arts then then it is not the campaign you are looking for.
To be honest, I am generally unhappy with most Coc scenarios. They don't deal with the sort of horror that I would want CoC to deal with, which is cosmic and philosophical, and with few exceptions have the PCs as assassins rather than scholars. Indeed, quite a few CoC scenarios feel like they would be better run as D&D and seem to expect a sort of Monte Haul campaign were players abuse published spells with low SAN loss and have a lot of optimized firepower like 10-gauge shotguns and Tommy Guns and just sort of wade through the monsters like a D&D party of murder hobos. What I really want to avoid is game that feel like the later books of Charles Stross's "Laundry" series, where the alien is made into not only the familiar, but the vehicle for ego tripping about gaining super-powers. The best "Laundry" stories remain the early ones, such as when we're viewpoint character racing across a dead landscape to close a door before we let in monsters that will eat our entire universe with literally no hope of resisting except to close the dang door.
However, while this is true I acknowledge that I have a hard time inventing the sort of scenarios that I want to have.