Last Train Home review

12.01.2024 - 08:46 / pcgamer.com

What is it? Survival management plus pausable RTS
Release date Out now
Expect to pay $40/£35
Developer Ashborne Games
Publisher THQ Nordic
Reviewed on Radeon RX 6800 XT, Ryzen 9 5900, 32GB RAM
Steam Deck Playable
Link Official site

Last Train Home is an engaging military management game and tactical RTS that puts you in charge of the Czechoslovak Legion as the Russian Civil War breaks out. Unable to return home by going west, you make a desperate plan: Capture an armored train and traverse Siberia. Your management of the journey is both on the train, assigning jobs and doling out supplies, and on the battlefield, controlling units of 10 soldiers in pausable, tactical RTS battles.

Last Train Home is not so much concerned with historicity as with giving you a glimpse into the desperate mood of a time and place. The Czech Legionaries don't want to fight on either side of the Russian Civil War. They really just want to go home, but nobody wants a large band of unaligned armed soldiers meandering about—least of all the Red revolutionaries, who quickly become your primary enemies. 

It's historical fiction that reduces the events of tens of thousands of people over years down to dozens over months, but it's well-done fiction that conveys a time and place with fidelity in emotion and detail rather than precision of events. It's also richly presented, with music and art that far outstrips what anyone expects from a game at this level of development and budget.

Much of the historical fervor in Last Train Home is underwritten by the narrator: Captain František Langer, a historical figure whose presence feels authentically Czech. The real-life Langer was a doctor, poet, and playwright who fought with the Legion across Siberia. It gives the writers leeway to ensure his lines are not just fitting, but poetic—both his narration, in-scene lines, and FMV performance are written (in English) and delivered (in Czech) with soul befitting one of the great literary countries of the 20th century. 

I'll illustrate by quoting the in-game Langer, saying that amid the violence of the civil war the sheer human misery simply never ended: «As did the fighting which went on and on without relent, a restless storm upon a human sea.»

Managing to survive that storm is your real job. Your soldiers have to become multi-skilled people: riflemen and boiler-stokers and machine gunners and engineers and doctors and scouts and cooks all at once, jobs you have to blend for them in an almost subversively open-ended system of RPG-esque character classes. Managing personnel is a well-designed delight where you need to balance running lean with the idea that your best engineer could get blown up by a stray shell on any given mission. People wear out