Recent reviews by Ralwin

You probably saw this and thought "Hang on. Is this Frostpunk on a train? That sounds awesome!", then you're right! It sounds awesome, but that's not what this is.
But is it still good?
Yes.

Last Train Home is a freezing and wartorn tale of the military unit of a newly formed nation desperately trying to get home through a foreign country embroiled in a civil war. As your train rolls along the rails of an increasingly frigid and hostile landscape, you will have to forage for supplies in ruins of villages, trade with locals, and do as much as you can to ensure that your supplies will last you the length of your journey.

If only things were that simple. Your resources aren't just food for your soldiers and coal for your locomotive, it's also bullets, first aid kits, medical supplies, and weaponry as your now former allies are eyeing you with increasing suspicion and you need to defend yourself as well as fight to break through blockades and take strategic objectives for precious supplies.

This game's largest action focus lies in the squad level combat of the missions. You will put together your squad on the train and send them on missions where you will be granted individual control of them. Your soldiers will get individual abilities, both passive and active, based on their Combat Role(s) that you can equip them with, weaponry, and various items, and it is up to you to make sure that they are used to the fullest.

You are a single unit against an entire army. You need to be smart about it to live through your deployments. For this, you can employ the basic stealth system. Your soldiers will find themselves in either Loud or Quiet mode. In Loud they will fire on anything that's in range, always be visible to enemies who can see them, and move at full speed. In Quiet, they will not fire unless directly fired upon, move more slowly, but be able to hide in bushes, tress, and other similar tall grass. If ordered to attack, they will attempt to sneak (in a beeline) towards the target and stealthkill them in one hit (this still produces some noise so nearby enemies might get suspicious).

Outside of not getting seen, your next best bet is not getting hit. For this, cover is vital. Unless you can take out the enemy soldiers before they get a chance to really fire back, you need your soldiers to be in cover or you will get hit. Thankfully, cover is neatly marked when hovering your cursor near it (and your units automatically snap their movement to it if it's marked), and if paused (called Tactical View) all cover is shown in your vision.

Between missions, you will manage your soldiers on board the train, assigning them work positions, their squad designations, and the train's various upgrades and cars. Alongside this, you will be sending out squads towards various Points of Interest on the map. Perhaps an abandoned village where you can attempt to gather building materials, forests where you can forage for food, and towns where you can trade for various materials, and potentially even weapons and ammunition. Your soldiers have various traits that can effect the outcomes at these PoI's, so you need to do your best to put together the most appropriate squads for these tasks.

This is also where the majority of the decision making is made in the narrative, whether to accept missions from the people who approach you, either from soldiers from one side or the other of the civil war, partisan fighters, or simple civilians in need of aid; donate supplies to starving parishes; or, as is worryingly common, ram through blockades or remove them. Can your locomotive, your only means of transport and source of safety in this desolate wasteland of snow and ice, take the battering, or do you choose to waste precious hours, time you don't know if you can spare, alongside the risk of your position being spotted and coming under attack, to simply dismantle it?

As a game that is two games alongside each other (one part squad strategy, one part resource management), you will find that the game has, effectively 4 difficulty settings. There's the classic Easy/Hard modes, but there's also Commander and Quartermaster. I am not good at strategy, however much I'd like to be, but I'm confident in my skill to manage limited resources and tight deadlines, so I played on Quartermaster, where the difficulty for the squad strategy was on Easy, and the difficulty for resource management was on Hard. This was a welcome affair as I was fairly certain I could manage one half of the game on full whack, but not the other. I still found the Hard resource management a bit on the easier side of things, but as with all things like this in life, your mileage may vary. Play on the one you find the most appealing. Of course, if you want a fully custom experience, you can also tweak individual parts of the difficulty settings.

Is this game without flaws? Of course not, games rarely are. The pathfinding for your people can sometimes get stuck, sometimes it can be hard to tell if beaning some guy with the butt of your rifle will alert his buddy, the icon for "your soldier will take cover" takes priority over "your soldier will be able to hide here", no matter if they're in Quiet or Loud, and the game DOES NOT autosave during missions (but it does when you're on the train) and if you want to restart the mission, you start all the way from forming the squad (which is fair), and makes you go through all of the dialogue and the intro cutscene for the mission (which can be skipped, thankfully). The quicksave key is F5 as per standard, by the way. Use it as you please.

On top of that, it can be hard to tell what your people can and cannot see in terms of firing lines and you won't know until you stare at them not firing at an enemy. Thankfully, Line of Sight tends to work both ways in this case. Also, sometimes, if you command some people to move one by one to get them into that perfect cover position, you might end up with two people on top of each other in the same spot, one soldier icon covering the other. Which means you won't notice that only one of them is in cover while the other gleefully takes bullets to the vitals, unless you know to look for it.

Is all of this a dealbreaker? No, not in the slightest. Most of my reloads came from my own idiocy (when you tell someone to plant a bomb, remember to tell them to then get away from the bomb), and only rarely from dodgy pathfinding meaning my soldier walked into a sight cone or not getting out of the radius of a grenade in time.

Overall, I'd recommend it. If you're longing for Frostpunk, I'd say go play Frostpunk, if you're longing for Company of Heroes, go play Company of Heroes. But if you feel that this blend sounds right for you, I would definitely give it a try. The soundtrack is suiting, the voice acting is great, the major story cutscenes is majority muhfugging FMV which is a huge plus in my book, and while the names might be a bit hard to remember for some (like me), you do eventually form a bond with them over the missions and the time spent taking care of them on the train.

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