The Last Spell: Prologue

The Last Spell is a turn-based tactical RPG in which you control 3-4 heroes to defend your town from waves of zombies from the mist. I like the day/night rotation system, where a wave of zombies attacks at night, and you must defend/survive, and earn rewards. Then during the day, you spend your rewards, level up your heroes, shop, build, assign workers, and plan for the next night. The hero levelup system is great, it's very satisfying to see a rare stat upgrade (you choose from a list of 5 randomly generated stat upgrades, each with a random rarity tier as well), and you also get perk points which give your hero a unique passive ability. There are limited perks available at the time, but some basic synergies or "builds" already exist, and I can see this expanding nicely with more added tiers of perks on release. There aren't really "classes" in a rigid sense. The weapons your character has equipped determine their combat abilities, so if your "mage" ends up getting more stat bonuses to melee dmg, you can just give them an axe and they are now a melee character. The combat is very satisfying. It's similar to other turn based tactics games like XCOM or Final Fantasy Tactics, but the main difference is that there are HORDES of zombies. Like 100+ per wave. So you have to carefully position big AoE attacks, but also be sure to pick off the lone runners trying to speed past your defenses, all while being careful not to leave your hero in a position where they will be overrun by the zombies. I would like to see more synergy and interaction between the characters. I found myself having the most fun when I was able to plan out strategies involving. multiple heroes, like using the one-handed axe to buff the damage of my heroes. Or using one hero to debuff a group of zombies, and have the other hero unleash a powerful attack that takes advantage of it. These opportunities existed, but were limited or sometimes just outperformed by solo attacks. And when the waves start coming from multiple different directions, you are forced to split up your party which led to less interaction between heroes. Overall, it feels very polished and plays very smooth for a free, pre-alpha demo. I can't wait to see where they go with it for the the full version of the game.

Ok, this is not a prologue, but an alpha demo of the game, so a lot of features are still missing. However, what's there seems solid. The only thing I'm worried about is that the levels take up a lot of time to finish and with it being roguleike, it seems it will just be very time demanding. On top of that, I'm slightly concerned that the battles will become repetitive as enemies seem very basic from the the short time I've played.

12 hours in on just a few levels. Really wish they made the demo one round longer. Just received a bonus item on the last round of the demo for the first time! Hope the full version comes out soon. Great tactics, decent sound, okay graphics. Each match manages to play fairly unique even though its the same map and same few early rounds there is tons of replay value already. Very interested to see how far they take it! There's certainly room for improvement, but the most important thing is that its already fun, and the changes I've seen take place have all made the game better. I was a little bit annoyed when they added caps to the weapon uses but its really not that big a deal once you get your second equip. It makes you pay attention so as not to waste any action points. A good tactic game should be all about forcing the player to make tough decisions constantly and this game certainly achieves that.

Tactics meets Darkest Dungeon. A good difficult exploration into a chaotic defense game where your heroes stand against waves of the undead. With base building and team management there is so much to take in with how small this prologue is. It is a very enjoyable experience making me want to come back for more every time. Very excited to see what the full game has to offer.

I like the idea and I may come back to this later. My current issue with the game is that it is not clear how each weapon works. There are very strict rules on how each weapon can be used which are not explained. So generally the pattern of play is you run up to dozens of undead, fumble your weapon, and get eaten. Then you start over until you figure out the starting 3 weapons and clear the first wave. But then you can buy or win new weapons, and the process starts over. So either you never upgrade your weapons or you end up having to start over every time you try a new one. Because you will die fumbling your weapon. The starting weapons have some good abilities that use a lot of mana, and you only get back 2 to 5 mana per day. You will burn that much in one round. So you are forced to use new/better weapons that are more mana efficient. There are a lot of weapons in the game, they look like they are procedurally generated so potentially thousands of them. I get that explaining how those weapons work will be a huge content add for the dev team, and perhaps a huge hurdle for them that they didn't consider when they started building out the game.

Quick update: I bought the full game and *definitely* recommend it! They have really added a lot in early access, and even though it's fantastic now I'm still excited to see how much it develops. I tend to play it, wait for a major update, then play it again! Many of my complaints have been addressed, and new features have been added. The original review is no longer applicable (at least to the full game). ------- I recommend the demo, but I'm not sure I'll buy the game. By the 4th night I considered skipping the 5th, since it had already become repetitive. I prefer well-crafted single play-throughs to games that rely heavily on procedural generation, but I don't really see where "re-rolling" the game would make much difference for me as a player. My play time is extended from leaving the game running while AFK, though I do take my time. I beat every night at S or A rank, never lost a hero, and took 1 hit to the spell-casters in the center. I found the difficulty level appropriate. I am recommending this game demo, so I offer the observations below as feedback. I love this type of game and would love to feel excited about the full-game, but I'm just not right now. My main complaint is with the UI. In the tactical phase, there are still some skills and debuffs I can't find information for, like panic. They did a pretty good job of exposing most buffs and debuffs, but there were huge gaps. The only way to see the number of shots my catapults have is to be standing next to them. I have no idea how much damage any enemy can do, or what their attack range is (particularly with archers). I never [spoiler]let one of the exploding guys from the 5th night explode next to a character, so I don't know if they will damage characters or just walls. They don't seem to hurt other enemies, so I figured a lightning scroll was safe to use without worrying about friendly fire and almost killed my own hero. [/spoiler] What can and cannot be dodged makes a big difference later in the game, and apparently enemies cannot dodge "suppressing fire", but I don't think that was labeled as such. I don't even know where to start with the inventory, perks, and leveling UI. I just did not find it pleasant at all. Not atrocious, but I'd give it 5/10. The firing pattern varieties are fun, but it's unclear what patterns they are until weapons are equipped, making it hard to purchase weapons effectively. It doesn't seem that you can rotate buildings. Line of sight is unclear, and rocks that are shorter than barricades (in the artwork) block all LOS, as do lamp posts. Fortunately the undo button is useful for scouting positions. After building an inn, I was surprised to see that I had to then buy the right to have a 4th hero, which I would be nice to know before building the inn. Can flying units fly over barricades? That would make sense, and I think I saw one do that once? But they can't fly over walls? Sometimes it's hard to tell whose health bar or status bar I'm looking at, or if something is behind a house it's hard to see. I appreciate the various camera movement options, but I mostly use edge scroll, and the UI invalidates it. So 60% of the left side of the screen is an edge scroll dead zone, as is the top right corner. It's too easy to fire at a worthless tile. If firing at a tile will produce absolutely no effect, perhaps a warning, if not just preventing that altogether? The tooltips for buildings (before building them) were not particularly helpful. Is "some mana" (or whatever non-quantitative term they used) 2 or 12? And the buildings have upgrades, too! I don't want to play 10 throw away games before I can make an informed decision about strategy. As for the gameplay: I found the tactical gameplay pretty solid, though the game punishes you for fighting inside the walls, but only lets you build one structure outside of the walls. So I mostly just built catapults. I had 9 for the final level. It would have been more fun to have better tactical options outside the walls. A thought on the RNG: There are enemy characters with [spoiler]40%[/spoiler] dodge. I quickly felt the dodge RNG was unfair, so I switched to un-dodgeable attacks. The one time I had no un-dodgeable attacks and really focused on killing the enemy, it dodged 6 in a row. That's entirely possible statistically, I know, but I had already felt the "true" odds were unfavorable, so perhaps the RNG on extremely high percentages could be rethought (as there are many ways to handle RNG, especially for tactical games, such as "pre-rolling" in groups of 5, where 2 will be misses and 3 will be hits, as opposed to an RNG that may be balanced over 1000s of rolls).

This is a very interesting defensive warchess strategy game. There are many kinds of items, skills, buildings and monsters in the game. The strategy and happyness of the game lies in randomness. Although it is a prologue, the game is still relatively difficult. You still needs a little effort to pass the first 5 levels. In general, the game is addictive and is an excellent game. I believe the official version will have more contents and the game will become more fun. -------------------------------------------------- Manual achievement: 0/0