The Last Spell

What is The Last Spell?

A newcomer looking into The Last Spell will probably see it described with keywords like: “Roguelike”, Turn-based Strategy, “Tower-defense”, and “Tactical RPG”. Annnnddd, yeah those are all spot-on, but when I heard these genres, my head was spinning, and I had no clear picture in mind on what to expect. So, here’s my attempt at describing this genre-melding title. The Last Spell has two distinct phases: the combat phase at night and the production phase during the day. The combat phase is defined by tactical, turn-based combat where you, the Commander, orchestrate a band of heroes defending your base. The production phase is defined by base/hero management with RPG and tower-defense elements. Sprinkled on top is some roguelike meta progression that carries over between campaigns and some difficulty/gameplay modifiers that offer some incentives for repeat playthroughs.

Big picture, each campaign will be 10ish nights and last 10+ hours. Each night you must fend off an ever-increasing zombie horde culminating in a boss battle on the last night. And each day, you must carefully think through resource management decisions and critical build choices for your heroes. While the nights are long and full of zombies, I found myself spending a lot of time in the production phase going back and forth in my head on what to do. There’s an overarching storyline that sees you completing multiple campaigns on a handful of maps if you’re interested in that sort of thing. As a fan of roguelikes and such, the run length is interesting. It’s not a 3-4 hour run like in Slay the Spire or FTL, but it’s not a 50 hour Darkest Dungeon campaign either. It sits in this middle ground, 10ish to even 20+ hours. Others probably play faster and as I get better that number will probably drop, but I think this is important to note as it will factor into one of my gripes later on.

Quick-fire Compliments

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

The Last Spell’s gameplay loop is addictive. It has that “ok, just one more turn” feeling through each phase, at all times. I can’t say how many times I’ve made a mental note to finish a combat phase and go to bed or make dinner, but then I find myself halfway through the production phase and saying to myself “I’ll just wrap this up, then be done”. I blame all the fun, bite-size, tactical decisions the game constantly throws at you. When I finish up a night of zombie slaying, I immediately want to reap my rewards and treat my heroes to level-ups and new perks/gear. Now that I have all these new, cool abilities and weapons, I want to try them out in battle, and this is how the cycle perpetuates.

With these compelling decisions always right around the corner, The Last Spell has a real energy to it. You get caught up in all of nuances as you want to make the right choice to synergize with another choice you’ll have to make. Games like The Last Spell are why I struggle with any narrative-based game that has cutscenes at any regular interval. If I’m playing a game I want to have to think, a silly statement I know, but it’s true and The Last Spell delivers on this, no doubt.

The Soundtrack

If you look at any commentary on The Last Spell, you can’t miss people praising the soundtrack. And rightfully so, this shit slaps hard. Right from the main menu Remi Gallego, the composer, knocks the damn air out or lungs with “Commander’s Theme”.

The battle tracks hit hard and ratchet up the adrenaline at night when the zombie horde is at your door.

Some of these throw me right back into Doom Eternal.

The hard hitters are contrasted by more chilling and ambient cuts that play in certain menus or in the slower production phase.

I have to stop myself before I link the entire soundtrack here, so I’ll just wrap up by saying that the soundtrack compliments The Last Spell well, but more importantly it helps the game as a whole stand out. In a landscape where we are awash with medieval fantasy RPGs and the like, the soundtrack adds a unique complexion to the atmosphere and tone that put’s The Last Spell in somewhat of its own lane.

Classless Character Builds

I loved it in Battle Brothers and I love it here! Seriously, one of the highlights of The Last Spell’s gameplay loop is leveling up your heroes after a long night of zombie slaying. Similar to Battle Brothers, a hero’s level up includes attribute increases and perk selection. The Last Spell has a wide range of primary and secondary attributes that feed into many build options. Selection is randomized by only letting you pick from a select few each level-up with anoption to reroll. So, you might plan a hero to focus on poison damage but never see that attribute. This leads into perk selection, because at some point you might have to pivot away from your original design. Perks are broken up into trees with 5 tiers and from the get-go you can see all your perk options. This means you can plan out a build ahead of time with contingencies for when you don’t see the attributes you want. Back to the poison build example, if you don’t see poison damage as an attribute option, maybe you don’t commit to high tier poison perks and go a different route. This on-the-fly, mid-run decision making makes hero builds always fun and dynamic, leaving you satisfied when everything goes according to plan and adlibbing into sub-optimal but original builds when things don’t click.

Fun and Thematic Tower Defense Integration

I’ve already explained how The Last Spell is a genre mashup but here I wanted to be more specific and say the tower defense mechanics are fun and thematic, if not a bit limited. The developers have recently, and probably in the past, stated the primary focus of The Last Spell is everything having to do with the heroes, meaning other defense options are reserved for supporting roles. This makes sense, the hero stuff is really well done and deserving of the starring role. The tower defense options are simple and fun for a bit. You can deploy ballista, catapults, and traps where certain hero builds can synergize with them in minor ways. Seeing your mounted ballista pick off a straggler that is out of your hero’s reach is satisfying visually as the animation of a bolt shredding zombie flesh into bloody giblets never gets old but also because it’s a relief you don’t have to order a hero over there, potentially putting them out of position. I wish there were a few more synergies or tower options, maybe a trebuchet or a boiling oil spewer… I feel like this area of the game is fun and unique while leaving some cool ideas still on the table.

Well-Paced, Engaging Turn-Based Combat

At night, the Zombie hordes are at your door and your heroes plus maybe some flimsy walls are the only thing standing in their way. Combat in The Last Spell has a general asymmetry to it, Zombies come in overwhelming numbers but are limited to single actions and don’t hit relatively hard, you typically command 3 to 6 heroes who you built up to hit like trucks over massive areas. Zombies are the pests and you are the pest control. I say the combat is well-paced because it has a nice rhythm and flow. Zombies advance, you evaluate their position and threat level, then you evaluate your hero’s position and options for attack. Each hero typically has 2 to 3 high impact actions with potentially multiple movement, buff/debuff type actions to round out their arsenal. This means you only have a couple impactful options to ponder and aren’t left paralyzed by multitude of menial choices.

This is helped along by action animations and sound effects that pop. They aren’t extravagant, they just hit right and effectively engage the player with every action. Some standouts in my opinion are the sword and the longbow. The sword has a momentum damage multiplier where damage goes up as you move and is coupled with actions that get you zipping around the battlefield. The result is your hero dancing around slicing and dicing zombies and you, the commander, can feel the momentum. The longbow, on the other hand, I like to post up, stationary on a watchtower and snipe zombies from a distance. The longbow rewards targeting isolated enemies and the sound effect hammers this home with a “zooming-in” effect plus pop that’s extremely satisfying. Couple this with an area-of-effect, rain of arrows attack that ices a whole cohort of zombies and you have a human double-shot, mounted ballista on HGH and steroids. And then you have magic and for this I’ll just let the screenshot below speak for itself…

My Two Gripes

Meta Progression

I’m split on the implementation of meta progression in The Last Spell. There are two branches of meta progression, one that provides unlocks through a currency called “tainted essence” and another that is achievement based. Both have issues and aspects that are fine, but what it really comes down to is what’s being unlocked. On both branches there are unlocks that improve your heroes gear, traits, and stats, I kind of loathe this. All the descriptions are very vague too, for instance “Stat level ups have a higher chance of being rare”, like what are we talking here? 5%, 25%? I don’t know and I’m not sure how the developers balance around all these modifiers. At the end of the day, I just don’t find this trickle feeding of minor, permanent upgrades very interesting. After 60 hours of playing, I don’t really care if my item rewards have a 5% chance of being rarer.

Then there’s unlocks for production buildings, weapon types, and defensive structures. These unlocks I see more as a method to simplify the game for beginners, not exposing them to an overwhelming number of options. I appreciate this design choice but feel like these unlocks could’ve come cheaper, sooner or in bulk. I was quite a few runs in, and I still had a couple production buildings to unlock. I think the main takeaway here is that I just want access to the full game sooner!

The only meta progression in The Last Spell I’m totally okay with is not really meta progression… and that’s weapon/armor variants and omens. The former is unlocked by using skills associated with a weapon/armor type or by reaching certain thresholds like getting X number of kills or applying X amount of debuffs. So, using a longbow enough will grant you access to the steel and silver longbow variants that have minor stat tweaks, I like this. Omens are unlocked by paying tainted essence and essentially just provide optional run modifiers, adding to the game’s replay-ability, this is fine too.

Gear Acquistion

In The Last Spell there are three methods for acquiring gear such as weapons, armor, and trinkets. One method of acquiring gear is through the shop, another is through production buildings, and lastly you can scavenge gear from corpses. On the surface these methods seem like completely logical and potentially fun ways to acquire gear, but in practice I found myself always tediously rerolling the shop until I found what I wanted. This ties into the economy of The Last Spell because what I’ve found is that the whole reason you make money is so that in the late game you can reroll the store as much as possible and find optimal gear. I kind of hate this… Take this for example, I think the store typically offers 20+ items and every reroll generously rerolls the entire store. Late game ideally you have 1,000+ gold available and you’re looking for top tier equipment for your 5 to 6 heroes. So you go to the shop, review 20+ items for their quality and synergies with each of your hero’s builds, purchase any “good” items, and then reroll the shop and review the 20+ items again. It feels too open and not restrictive enough. It’s still hard to find the optimal weapon or piece of armor. But the process is so open-ended that it feels like you're sifting through someone’s bottomless chest of randomly generated gear, and I don’t enjoy that. This process strips the uniqueness from the gear by detaching it from the core gameplay. Exposing the player to a randomly generated spreadsheet of items for them to sift through strips the uniqueness because now everything is unique!

In Battle Brothers if you take on a difficult enemy encampment deep in the wilderness, there’s a chance to get a “famed” item. You can’t reroll that item, you can’t buy it in a shop, the item you found is the item you get. Sometimes this is a let down because you don’t have anyone who can use that weapon or the weapon just stinks. But other times you might have an up-and-coming recruit who’s build you can shift into utilizing that weapon. Other times, the weapon is incredible, so you hold onto it just to find the right recruit. Or maybe that longtime veteran of your company who’s always used a generic sword finally gets rewarded with a unique sword that fits him just right. I feel like The Last Spell’s gear acquisition just strips out too much of the story or heart and leaves you just rerolling and perusing.

Verdict

★★★1/2

I haven’t beaten all the maps in The Last Spell but I feel done with the game. The first 50 hours was an absolute thrill ride, only being bogged down by slow meta-progression and tedious gear optimization. Runs are long but maybe not what you would call a campaign, think 10-15 hours. Run strategies don’t feel all that different, building economics and good hero builds always work. 70 hours in and I don’t have a whole lot of motivation to continue. Many of my favorite games: Rimworld, Battle Brothers, FTL, the list goes on, I bounced off of the first time around. I enjoyed them, but was too fatigued to finish them, I saw their greatness but didn’t have close to a complete understanding of their mechanical depth. The Last Spell might fall in this category and only time will tell. The bones of something great is here, the snappy, stylish turn-based combat, the flair in the presentation with a dynamic and genre-spanning soundtrack, the fun and flexible classless hero builds, all highlight some exceptional game design. So, while I might be done for now, I look forward to revisiting The Last Spell with a fresh set of eyes in the future.