Last Train Home Review in Progress – Not your standard fare

thesixthaxis.com:

For the Czechoslovak Legion in Last Train Home, the difficulties they face are very different from realising you’re not going to catch the 00:40 from London Victoria to Bromley and need to face up to an expensive as heck cab ride back. Instead, they face an almost impossible mission simply to survive, having to go thousands of miles away from their newly independent home of Czechoslovakia, charting passage between two sides of a cruel civil war on the way from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Inspired by true events of the Czechoslovak Legion’s actions at the tail end of WWI, this game shines a light on what is an easily overlooked part of history of the time – in Western Europe and the US, the focus is all too often on trench warfare and the broader strokes of the Russian revolutions and civil war. The only option available to them is to take trains and start chugging down the tracks to travel the full length of Russia. Where there were tens of thousands of soldiers making this trek in reality, Last Train Home narrows down the focus to your one train and a small outfit of soldiers.

Last Train Home starts with a short journey to Moscow with a heavily armed military train, hoping to get good news from negotiations to secure your safe passage. Right away you’re presented with the two sides of this game. On the one hand you have the train journey itself across the Russian countryside, with a bunch of points of interest dotted around, narrative moments to encounter, and then there are missions to take on, in which you switch to taking control of a small squad of soldiers in real-time tactical combat. To be utterly reductive, it’s like FTL with a side serving of Commandos.

The train and crew management is full of layers as you marshal