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Last Train Home is an upcoming PC strategy from developer Ashborne Games, a Brno-based studio owned by THQ Nordic, known for their support work on titles like Arma, Mafia, Vigor, Silent Hill: Downpour and Shadowgun Legends to name a few.
Their first major in-house project is a historical title depicting the journey of a group of Czechoslovak soldiers who find themselves stranded in the midst of the Russian Civil War, with the sole objective of returning home safely.
The game is inspired by true events, more specifically by the 1918 evacuation of the Checzolovakian Legion from Bolshevik Russia. The legion travelled over 9,000 kilometres long journey to Vladivostok, passing through the freezing cold of Siberia and fighting Bolsheviks in many battles on the way.
Last Train Home takes this story and respectfully creates a train/crew management sim with deep gameplay mechanics and tactically challenging real-time battles.
In the preview build that the developer kindly provided to AltChar, I got to play the first five hours of the game, which included several main missions, side quests and an introduction to the game's various mechanics.
The gameplay loop in Last Train Home consists of travelling the gorgeously recreated large war-torn wasteland with a train, managing your crew, stopping to gather food and other resources and taking on various missions from a real-time strategy perspective.
The train is your safe haven and keeping it running is one of the key aspects of the game. You can upgrade the train to make it more durable, consume less fuel and make it more comfortable for your crew among other things.
The health and morale of your crew are equally important. Just like in real life, the soldiers need to eat and rest regularly so you'll need to visit nearby lakes and woods to gather food and upgrade the living spaces on your train to have a place where they can relax and heal. Fail to provide those and the journey may end before it's even properly started as soldiers will desert once the overall morale hits a critical level.
When it comes to the real-time strategy perspective, I was genuinely surprised how much love have devs put in this part of the game. Last Train Home's real-time battles are challenging and require a smart tactical approach. Rambo-style rush will result in catastrophic outcomes for your crew.
Before every battle, you can choose a group of five to eight soldiers that will participate in the mission. The key is to have a well-balanced group of classes consisting of medics, machine gunners, scouts and riflemen. Each soldier can also be promoted and learn new roles, meaning that they can be a medic or scout in combat but cook or engineer when they are on the train.
As you travel, the game will offer you various side missions that provide you with valuable resources like fuel, food, cloth, wood, medical supplies and others. Missions usually consist of battles but can also have different tasks like helping local folk repair their village after the Red Army left it devastated, rescuing your fellow Legionnaires and more.
In the five hours that I got to play, Last Train Home had plenty of mission variety, featuring maps set in deep forest areas, farming villages, and urban city streets, crawling with Bolsheviks. The demo certainly was a well-balanced experience, offering a little bit of everything - crew and train management, resource gathering, upgrades and real-time battles.
It was a perfect introduction to the larger piece of the pie that comes later when Last Train Home should become an even deeper and more immersive experience as you enter more treacherous lands.
In terms of visual presentation, Last Train Home is a beautiful game with sprawling landscapes that really give a realistic sense of scale and distance that you're crossing. You can even zoom in to watch your train run along tracks in stunning scenery consisting of pine forests, wealth fields, lakes, hills and farm villages among other things.
The level of detail in real-time battles is great, too, as you can notice in the screenshots. Depending on the mission, Last Train Home also offers various weather patterns so expect to see heavy rainfall but also plenty of sunny days, too.
I also have to briefly mention the sound, more specifically, the immersive sound mode which provides a more authentic experience by mixing Czech, Slovak and Russian languages. Even though the game has a full English voiceover, I think the immersive mode is how Last Train Home should be played.
