The holiday break has finally given me a chance to catch up on some games I've missed out on recently--launching a website takes up a lot of time!--and one of the first I wanted to try out was Last Train Home.
Released back in November, it's a strategy game with a fairly unique setting. Taking place directly after the armistice that brought an end to the First World War, the story focuses on a unit of Czech soldiers venturing from Russia to their newly-created homeland, formed as part of the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
While for most men the return from that nightmarish war was a cause for celebration, for these guys in particular--part of the Czechoslovak Legion--the end of one conflict simply meant the beginning of another. In trying to get home from fighting on the Eastern Front, they found themselves embroiled in the Russian Civil War that ran from 1917-1919.
Last Train Home has you taking command of one of these units, as you try to fight your way across a hostile Russian countryside so you can catch a ship home. Split across strategic management and real-time combat missions, it plays exactly as the setting demands: it's a tense battle for survival that is focused almost entirely on your adventures along a single piece of railway.
The spiritual heart of the game is a strategic overview screen where you manage your train. As your sole means of getting all the way from Moscow to Vladivostok--a journey of over 5600 miles, or over 9000kms--it serves as your base of operations. You not only need to repair and maintain the train as you trundle along the Trans-Siberian railway, but you can also upgrade so that it can house more soldiers, allow for more relaxation and even support you in battle with artillery turrets.
Of course being a train it also needs fuel, and being humans your troops also need supplies, so it's not like you can just point the train "East" and enjoy a journey that in 2024 is a luxury holiday. You constantly need to be stopping the train to get out and do stuff, whether it's forage for supplies, meet townspeople, go on little quests or fight the evil Bolsheviks (a note of caution: this game is not interested in the nuances of history, only its broadest brushstrokes).
In most of these cases this is where the action switches to an isometric, real-time combat mode, where you directly control squads of infantry in missions that are sometimes stealthy, sometimes explosive and sometimes a mix of the two. In a nice touch, not only do these feature traditional objectives, like "kill this guy" or "get as many of you to safety as possible", but the maps are also littered with supplies essential to your journey, like scrap metal, ammo, clothing and food, which given their scarcity and importance did more to encourage me to explore every dark corner of the map than I can ever remember a game like this managing before.
These combat missions are surprisingly complex. You can end up controlling a lot of soldiers, who can all be personally kitted out, each have special powers and classes and can also basically be split between a regular combat mode and a sneaky stealth game mode. That's a lot to be worrying about in real time! Thankfully Last Train Home is heavily reliant on the space button, which can pause the action at any time and allow you to assign and line up a number of orders, which are then carried out once you resume.
I haven't finished the game, but what I have played has been great. We've all played games with this kind of strategic vs tactical split before, from XCOM to Phantom Brigade, but the linearity and movement involved in being based on a train is really cool. It never stops being a blast just pulling the lever, stopping the train, letting some guys jump out and go explore some woods to go fishing or shoot some bad guys.
Also good: the strategic management of your troops, which actually feels like you're managing your troops, not just assigning them stats like some attribute-based spreadsheet overseer. Like most games of this ilk, your soldiers have classes and jobs to do, but on this journey everyone has a job off the battlefield as well. Your armoured train isn't some cushy base back home; stuck behind enemy lines on a moving headquarters, every engineer and cook has to also be able to fight, and every soldier has to know how to mend uniforms and make repairs. Juggling these jobs, and each soldier's associated stamina--they can't work or fight if they get too tired--was an elastic treat. Work too hard on the train and they can't fight; fight too much and they can't perform essential work on the train. Managing shifts and energy levels sounds boring, but it's fun in Football Manager and FIFA, and it's fun here.
Last Train Home is also dripping with atmosphere. I don't know what I was expecting coming into this, but relative to the type of game this is, the production values are off the charts, from unique character art all the way through to lavish FMV cutscenes. That's not only nice to see on a genre-specific basis--I wish more strategy games cared about how pretty they are!--but it really helps set the tone as well. This is a grim mission taking place across unfathomable distances, where you're in constant danger and need to get to know and recognise every soldier at a glance, and Last Train Home nails it on all counts.
I'm slightly disappointed in the game's slightly cavalier attitude to history; for such a niche (for most international players, at least) topic, it feels weird for Last Train Home to go so hard in picking its setting then essentially write fiction for the actual journey. But then simplifying some things, changing others and focusing on a narrative is also understandable given Last Train Home's depiction of a single train and the soldiers inside it, and not the wider strategic situation, whose actual history can best be described as sounding more fictitious than this game's actually fictional storyline.
But only disappointed enough to write a single paragraph about it here, not to have it detract in any meaningful way from what was one of my most pleasant surprises of 2023. Last Train Home is out now on Steam, but there's also a demo available if you want to try it out first.
