We have known for quite some time that the relatively newly formed Brno studio Ashborne Games has been working on something for the third year. However, we had to wait patiently until this June, when the developers revealed that their mysterious project is essentially a management real-time strategy, set in the period of the First World War. Not only that, Last Train Home follows the story of Czechoslovak legionnaires and the studio takes this historical connection very seriously.
The authentic atmosphere is also ensured by the very well-crafted gameplay. Your task in this game? Get on the train for real and set off on a dangerous journey across Siberia. The game is divided into two parts: managerial and strategic.
The strategic one is about exploring the surroundings, collecting resources and interacting with friends and enemies. The managerial one, on the other hand, is about managing your train. In some ways, it resembles game principles that it mixes and adopts from various popular games such as FTL or FROSTPUNK.
As you can easily joke, the train cannot be kept alive by mere love of the country. In the course of the main missions, you will visit many places where you will not miss the main task that will advance you in the story. But if you run out of coal in the set’s boiler, the machine just won’t move. It’s always a good idea to explore each location deeper and collect as many survival items as possible. This includes not only coal, but also various types of food, clothing, cartridges and other materials.
Last Train Home can handle both map design and time very well. Because the missions take place in real-time, you have to have good control over your whole unit, but you can also pause the game at any time and issue all the necessary commands in the safety of the game.
Each of your legionnaires is not just a number, and you certainly won’t care who “so-called” catches it. You will carefully consider where to deploy the machine gun nest and how to provide first aid to your wounded. The developers bet on an unusually wide number of game mechanics, which, however, combine so smoothly and casually, however, there is nothing to be surprised when the creators of Altar Original War are also working on the game.
They say jumping on the bandwagon is hard. Even more so when you have to jump out of it. But in this game, the game time relentlessly pressures you not only in individual missions, but also between them.
You watch how your desired home travels through the landscape and you can stop it at any time. In the best case, because you want to send a small landing party to the nearby village to buy raw materials… and in the worst case, when the machine breaks down.
Each of your legionnaires has different professions and associated abilities that expand as you play. As players, you will have to distribute forces in an appropriate way. It is also necessary to think about the fatigue of individual soldiers, and if someone came back cracked from a demanding mission, he will not be able to immediately put on overalls and manage the boiler.
But here the rules of the game go even further. Just like the engine, you will also need to take care of the sick in the hospital wagon, and more than once you will have to decide on the filling of all important job positions, including the night and day shift schedule. But this thing may not be pleasant for all players, because it requires a relatively large part of the game to be devoted to micro-management.
The atmosphere of the game is significantly helped not only by historical accuracy, but also by excellent dubbing. Although we have played the game in English so far, we had the opportunity to turn on the so-called immersive dubbing, and as you probably correctly guessed, it consists of the Czech, Slovak and Russian languages.
Together it works perfectly. Thus, the developers managed to bring Last Train Home to a level similar to the third part of Warcraft, when we enjoyed tapping on units in vain just to listen to all their prepared announcements. The dubbing is over three hours long and we will hear the voice of Karel Dobrý, among other things. We already heard this in the Czech trailer, and during the campaign you will recognize him as Captain Langer, i.e. one of the main characters.
Last Train Home will soon arrive at the destination station to start a much more challenging journey for the players.
It will finish on the digital tracks already on November 28, i.e. in almost a month. Whether it will be a pre-Christmas hit is not yet certain, but something tells us that this game will not go unnoticed.
At least we can say that in terms of technological processing, imagination and innovative ideas, it has been a long time since we were looking forward to the release of some strategy so much.
2023-10-17 11:09:17
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