Last Train Home

Huge disappointment for me and in a short amount of hours. When I bought and started playing Last Train Home I was hoping for a more somber or dark experience led by a struggle for resources when combat is so brutal and around every corner. Instead you get an awkward forceful dialogue experience where characters literally say Marvel-movie tier quips and battles go on endlessly as you slowly move around maps boringly stealthing every combat mission. The trainride map is designed in a way that as long as you put units places you will never come close to running out of resources either, and random events essentially "fake" hardships. Or of course get into actual "loud" combat and just dakka+zurg everything because you'll have a large squad and boredom will catch up. I mean I've got 10 dudes and pausing takes more time, so why not just right click everything? It works even on hard mode. If you're really, really, really into the Commandos series of games but you don't enjoy the charm and mechanics in terms of moving around a map and slowly stealth killing literally everything, then this is going to be your favorite game. For me the stealth mechanics were boring and tiresome after just 5 hours and it seems that every battle was catered off of exploiting the basic stealth mechanics rather than loud combat. Use recon's easily exploitable "discover anything" ability, move one person around and slowly kill the very-obviously-choreographed patrol lines. It takes like 45 minutes and it's a chore every time rather than feeling fun. And even when you play loud combat it's very simple, clunky, and lacks immersion or impact. Especially when afterward your troops will be goofily talking or saying quippy dialogue. Aside all of this the train management is abysmal. There's no easy way to list your troops or filter them by basically any metric that makes it easy/quick to manage. It's trial and error for the most part and on top of it you can't rename troops or give them nicknames or even color codes so that you can easily remember "ah, this guy is good at repairing" etc. -- you just have to tediously look through a lot of screens every time if you don't have immaculate memory. I never felt a pressure for any of the resources given unless I was doing it to myself, like thinking I would need more bandages or medkits later. And at the end of the day your time is the main resource. Do you want to spend literally an hour slowly stealth killing everything or fly through a mission but get some troops hurt in like 10 mins? I picked the latter after doing the former two or three times because it was that awful. Anyway, overall incredibly disappointing for a game I thought would really engage with me. A really unique concept but without active grit or immersion to be found and a very boring and chore-like gameplay loop.