Quick video review: https://youtu.be/9XcWHDRiUIk
Last Train Home is a lot of things. It’s a real time tactics game, but also a survival management game. It’s an RTS, but with a full fledged historical narrative in a setting we don’t often see. Some of these it does well, some it doesn’t.
Gameplay
The game basically has two sides to it: the real time tactics of its individual missions and the larger RTS, survival resource management side of things. The former is fairly straightforward. You deploy a squad of soldiers to a given mission and complete a number of objectives to win.
It’s nothing too complicated, but it’s definitely not bad. The game gives you a variety of unit-dependent skills to use, a cover system that basically decides the victor in drawn-out battles, several different weapon types, intuitive field of view tools, and an entire slate of hotkeys to manage your gameplay. That’s all great to have, but it is also unfortunately coupled with some shoddy AI and combat that can come across as stiff. A lot of the time, you can simply rush in and wipe out enemies by having the sheer numerical advantage and if you don’t want to go that route, you can simply wait behind cover and let the AI wander towards you and just die without fighting back.
It’s a bit weird overall. The missions sometimes work and are fun, but sometimes have little issues like this that make it hard to take seriously. Still, I would say it leans more towards the fun side of things.
Similar things can be said about the RTS gameplay. You basically have this train serving as your home base and need to send squads out to gather supplies, disembark at stations to trade with local merchants, and tackle side objectives along the way to your next big destination. It’s a pretty cool system to have on top of the regular mission stuff and I quite liked being able to customize and upgrade my train, manage my units with all the different class types and abilities, and the random events that popped up occasionally were cool too.
However, this also comes with its issues. The actual act of making and sending out squads is probably my biggest problem. It’s just so unintuitive. You can’t filter by specific traits, so a lot of the time you’re stuck manually sorting through units to assign to squads and these units cannot be placed on more than one. You can’t rename squads, you can’t auto-assign at all, it’s really just a bunch of micro-managing and really brings down this aspect of the gameplay.
Story
The narrative here is genuinely interesting and a great driving force for the game. It is a bit janky in some areas - like the lack of pause between most dialogue lines - but the setting is super unique, it’s all voice acted in the original languages spoken by each country, and it's fairly fast-paced without feeling rushed, making for a pretty engaging overall experience.
Performance
The game looks great at 4k, max settings on my 3080 Ti and manages to run incredibly smooth on top of that. Over 100 fps without many dips, stutters, or other such technical issues. Maybe I am just used to games from this genre performing poorly, but I was impressed by the polish here.
Overall
So I would say Last Train Home is deserving of a light recommendation. It may have its issues, particularly with its AI and reliance on tedious micro management, but the gameplay is fun, the RTS train management side of things is super cool, and it's all tied together by an engaging narrative. All while running smoothly with great graphics on top of that. With some quality of life upgrades, I can really see this one being a great recommendation for the genre. Even in its current state though, it’s worth a look on sale at least.
Last Train Home is a lot of things. It’s a real time tactics game, but also a survival management game. It’s an RTS, but with a full fledged historical narrative in a setting we don’t often see. Some of these it does well, some it doesn’t.
Gameplay
The game basically has two sides to it: the real time tactics of its individual missions and the larger RTS, survival resource management side of things. The former is fairly straightforward. You deploy a squad of soldiers to a given mission and complete a number of objectives to win.
It’s nothing too complicated, but it’s definitely not bad. The game gives you a variety of unit-dependent skills to use, a cover system that basically decides the victor in drawn-out battles, several different weapon types, intuitive field of view tools, and an entire slate of hotkeys to manage your gameplay. That’s all great to have, but it is also unfortunately coupled with some shoddy AI and combat that can come across as stiff. A lot of the time, you can simply rush in and wipe out enemies by having the sheer numerical advantage and if you don’t want to go that route, you can simply wait behind cover and let the AI wander towards you and just die without fighting back.
It’s a bit weird overall. The missions sometimes work and are fun, but sometimes have little issues like this that make it hard to take seriously. Still, I would say it leans more towards the fun side of things.
Similar things can be said about the RTS gameplay. You basically have this train serving as your home base and need to send squads out to gather supplies, disembark at stations to trade with local merchants, and tackle side objectives along the way to your next big destination. It’s a pretty cool system to have on top of the regular mission stuff and I quite liked being able to customize and upgrade my train, manage my units with all the different class types and abilities, and the random events that popped up occasionally were cool too.
However, this also comes with its issues. The actual act of making and sending out squads is probably my biggest problem. It’s just so unintuitive. You can’t filter by specific traits, so a lot of the time you’re stuck manually sorting through units to assign to squads and these units cannot be placed on more than one. You can’t rename squads, you can’t auto-assign at all, it’s really just a bunch of micro-managing and really brings down this aspect of the gameplay.
Story
The narrative here is genuinely interesting and a great driving force for the game. It is a bit janky in some areas - like the lack of pause between most dialogue lines - but the setting is super unique, it’s all voice acted in the original languages spoken by each country, and it's fairly fast-paced without feeling rushed, making for a pretty engaging overall experience.
Performance
The game looks great at 4k, max settings on my 3080 Ti and manages to run incredibly smooth on top of that. Over 100 fps without many dips, stutters, or other such technical issues. Maybe I am just used to games from this genre performing poorly, but I was impressed by the polish here.
Overall
So I would say Last Train Home is deserving of a light recommendation. It may have its issues, particularly with its AI and reliance on tedious micro management, but the gameplay is fun, the RTS train management side of things is super cool, and it's all tied together by an engaging narrative. All while running smoothly with great graphics on top of that. With some quality of life upgrades, I can really see this one being a great recommendation for the genre. Even in its current state though, it’s worth a look on sale at least.