Last Regiment (Review)
Source: Review Copy
Price: £15.49
Where To Get It: Steam
“Are you sure you want to leave this awesome game?” Well… Yes, because I have reviews to write, food to cook, life to live, etcetera, and… You’re sounding a little confident there, game!
Nonetheless, although The Last Regiment is in Early Access, although there are things I dislike about it, it definitely shows promise. Some stuff, however, it needs to work on, before I could give something approaching a thumbs up. So let’s summarise what it is, and get the stuff it needs to work on out the way fast.
So, The Last Regiment is a fantasy turn based strategy game, in which… Ehehe, the units are represented by cards you draw from a deck, with the addition of some building only cards you can draw from occupied buildings, but it’s… Only sort of a deckbuilder. More accurately, the cards, be they units or abilities you get in a campaign mission are pretty set, but in Skirmish and Multiplayer modes, you can pick and choose to make a deck consisting of twelve types of cards, 1 set rare (1 each in the deck), 1 set uncommon (2 of each in the deck), and 1 set common (3 of each), limited still by the faction you pick. It’s not a bad idea, honestly, and it seems to work just fine.
However, that UX is definitely something that needs fixing. The menus are fine. But when you get into battle, and you can juuuust about see those tiny action buttons in the bottom left corner, that’s… No, that needs fixing, or at least be scalable for people who aren’t perfectly comfortable with the concept of eyestrain. Otherwise on the accessibility front, colours seem okay, elements, apart from the size relatively clear, tooltips are alright, and it starts with subtitles on, which should be a god-damn standard.
Play wise, well… The idea that cards are randomly drawn, on top of the usual resource management inherent to a turn based strategy game like this, isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think, because there are things that make units last longer, even if they’re still limited in what they can do. They can assault, rather than just attack, minimising damage (but not stopping, say, other attackers from engaging in a normal battle with the unit), fortify, buff, upgrade no matter where they are… It’s a game where I can see myself exploring it and not feeling cheated by worse than average odds, because I can even them out some, buy more time to build up defenses, or sneak around to capture things.
I’m less fond of the campaign being fully linear, however. There’s multiple factions, and while I appreciate that the story’s meant to be shifting from one to the other as things go forward, it just feels needlessly limiting, and I have to go to skirmish mode to explore a faction before I play their campaign, and experience their story. This is, however, a personal taste thing, as is finding some of the Live2D animations a little off.
Overall, though? This shows promise as a strategy game, and worth a poke.
Props on having goblins be the first faction, though. Goblins need more love.