Last Train Home

An ambitious hybrid of RTS, management, and narrative history masterfully put together to represent a unique war story that easily smooths over some AI quirks.

It's easy for ideals to be worth the civil wars that are waged, but so often do we forget the lives of those who were impacted outside of the conflict. Last Train Home is a wonderful look at that haunting reality.

A war torn blend of classic RTS and new aged management sim, Last Train Home is a fresh approach to the strategy genre. Not only is it a fresh take on a heavily populated genre, it is a challenging and rewarding adventure driven by an engaging narrative based around true events. Interestingly, the game provides a certain sense of humanization to its strategy mechanics. This sort of approach changes your soldiers from a faceless army of drones into real people making you feel responsible for every single loss. Of course, this is the trick of the game. It begins to deepen beyond a simple objecti...

Last Train Home does a great job of meshing a challenging strategic experience with an immersive setting and story. The difficulty curve can get overwhelming for less experienced RTS players, but the attention to detail and the wonderful character interactions make it worth taking the time to learn the ropes.

So the combat is good, the squad management is good, and setting an ambush with a handful of troops and watching it play out perfectly is the real deal…but that’s not even the point. The point is herding your Czechs through the Russian Revolution, carefully leveling them up and picking their jobs, deciding what they do, hoping they don’t die, and cringing when they do because not only did you lose your best medic, you lost your best train fixer and now everyone’s depressed and the train’s broken again. And that’s what games are all about: Everything being depressing and broken while you’re sur...

Last Train Home is a historically adapted game that takes place over 100 years ago in the wake of World War 1. While the great war is over, the fight still continues with civil war breaking out as a legion of Czechoslovak soldiers struggle home on a train. It’s also worth mentioning that the journey is over 9000km. This certainly isn’t your average commute but how does a real-time strategy game fair on an Everest of a journey? Considering current world events, playing a game set after Wor...