Games

A masterpiece of strategy based on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the Russian Civil War, Last Train Home is let down by its shallow history. By Katherine Cross.

Last Train Home is an RTS masterpiece

A screenshot from Last Train Home.

Credit: Ashborne Games

Has there ever been quite the collision of scale, romance, failure and glory that the Trans-Siberian Railway represents? A strategic misfire that couldn’t save tsarist Russia, it nevertheless became an enduring romance of steel and logistics that came to symbolise and unite a nation. Its early days make a perfect – and novel – setting for a strategy game.

Last Train Home has you pilot an armoured train away from the ruins of one nation to the dawn of another, shepherding home dozens of Czech legionnaires from the terrors of the 1919 Russian Civil War. Due to shifting alliances, you have to go east to go west: your train must traverse the 9000-kilometre iron road to Vladivostok, ferrying you and your troops to a ship that will, at last, bear you all the way back to Czechoslovakia.

It’s a hell of a set-up. But the historical existence of the Czech legionnaires who fought with the Russians against the Austro-Hungarian Empire in a bid for their nation’s freedom is about all that can be said to be historically accurate about this game.

Last Train Home is built on a scale as ambitious as the railroad that forms its spine. It’s a resource management game that sees you maintain your armoured train, swap out and add carriages, engines and even an artillery car. Every soldier is handcrafted with their own name, portrait, backstory, strengths, weaknesses, even ideology. They take turns staffing different posts on the train and going out into the Russian wilderness to chop wood, hunt game, scavenge for supplies and more. You juggle their fatigue, morale, susceptibility to injury and disease and the development of their skills as you try to keep this train going amid the constant threat of attack from the warring Russian forces.

Then there’s the other half of the game, a real-time strategy affair that’s rewarding and haunting in its bleak rendering of 1919 Russia in wartime. You assemble a squad, ideally made up of each of the five types of soldier – medic, machine gunner, rifleman, scout, grenadier – and dispatch them into the field to complete objectives. Often, you have to do this in order to proceed through the game. Other times, these combat missions are side quests rich in rewards and narrative flavour.

These two halves of the game are equally ambitious and wildly different in pacing and feel, yet somehow harmonise perfectly. Fully voice-acted in Czech, Russian and English, the game’s cinematic aspirations come into focus during its chapter-bookending cutscenes, so finely crafted they almost look photorealistic.

Where the game falters is in its pretensions of a larger, more meaningful narrative. This is not necessarily a good war story and it’s certainly not good history. This isn’t attributable to poor writing: the dialogue is often strong and eloquent, held aloft by some passionate voice acting. The issue lies in how the game’s structure cannot wed itself to a deeper narrative with lessons more interesting than “war is hell”.

The main story only skims the surface of the possibilities broached by the Russian Civil War. Some of that seems to be the shallowness imposed by the game’s structure – there’s only so many places it allows dialogue to flow, choices to be made, a story to be told. There are many missed opportunities. Perhaps the greatest lies in a subject that seems to be a sore spot for the game’s developers: the accusation that they’re churlishly anti-communist.

No, the Bolsheviks did not cover themselves in glory during the Russian Civil War; nor did other leftist revolutionaries such as the anarchist Nestor Makhno, whose men led pogroms against Jews and Mennonites in what is now Ukraine. It’s also worth remembering that Ashborne Games is a Czech company: as the Russo–Ukrainian war reminds us, there is a reason many Eastern Europeans are less than charitable towards Russia.

Even so, Last Train Home’s depiction of the Reds feels excessive. They are indistinct, moustache-twirling villains whose hobbies are committing war crimes and killing you. The tsarist Whites are also occasionally portrayed as villainously incompetent, cruel and corrupt, but there are many who are humanised, who break ranks to aid you and your troops, whom you rescue and enlist to your cause to simply get the hell back home. The Whites are painted in shades of grey while the Reds emerge as half-dimensional villains.

It feels tendentious in the extreme, especially when the Whites were just as guilty of war crimes – including violently anti-Semitic pogroms amid the White Terror. Speaking of which, Jews scarcely rate a mention in the game. There are other glaring absences. Near the end, your crew can take a southern passage that leads them through northern Manchuria with a stopover in Harbin, yet there’s nary a Chinese person in sight, never mind any of the Asiatic peoples of Siberia and Russia’s Far East.

Art can never focus on everything all at once but a game like this, which purports to provide the player with a sampling of this complex, ugly conflict, would’ve been enriched by the inclusion of these other perspectives. There’s a real sense that there was some anti-communist zeal in the writing that overrode the possibility of better storytelling.

The game is at pains to almost always refer to the bad guys as “the Reds” rather than “the communists”; several of your own soldiers can, themselves, be communist. There’s a certain realism in how your troops are portrayed as having various competing ideologies, each of them rising from the tempestuous cauldron of the early 20th century. But rather than a thoughtful exploration that might’ve said something interesting about our own, equally dangerous cauldron here in the 2020s, soldier ideology means little beyond determining morale boosts or hits when you make certain decisions. This is where the game derails.

It clearly wanted to do so much, but its narrative fails to live up to its grand design. This was such a compelling game that I thought of it as I went to bed, dreaming of tactics to get me through a mission. I loved that train deeply, I loved upgrading it, thinking about upgrades to prioritise, training my troops, developing favourites among their number – hell, even thinking about the order of my train carriages. I was excited by the combat missions, which reward the careful staging of ambushes. Three of your soldiers stealing an enemy armoured car and using its machine gun to save the day will always make you feel like you’ve earnt the rank of major.

This game is made by people who deeply admire the Czechoslovak Legion to the point of hero-worship; looking at it this way, as a story told with all the usual embellishments and exaggerations, makes the simplicity of the narrative go down easier. The story, shallow as it sometimes is, holds the game together with as much meaning as one might find in classics of the genre such as Homeworld. This game is an RTS masterpiece – I played it five times for this review, after all. Optimisation and strategy are glorious in this game.

If you can content yourself with these ludic pleasures, Last Train Home is worth every penny. But if you were hoping for a gaming exploration of a conflict other than World War II with something meaningful to say, you may have to look elsewhere.

Last Train Home is available on Steam.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 12, 2025 as "Better dead than red".

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