tinyBuild Games have published some of my favourite indie games. Over the past few months I spent some time alternating between Party Hard and Punch Club so when I was offered the chance of playing the closed beta of The Final Station, which is one of their next games as a publisher, I jumped right to it. And I don’t regret it at all.
If I had to define The Final Station in a few words, I’d say it’s the lovechild of Snowpiercer (but with way less snow) and FTL. The devs (Russian studio Do My Best Games) mention influences of This War of Mine but I still haven’t played it so I don’t know about that. This game is a 2D action-adventure game with beautiful pixel art and featuring rogue-like and survival elements. It’s set in a post-apocalyptical future where our character (and our train) represents the last hope.
We play as the train operator and the game mechanics change depending on whether we’re on the train or not. When we’re off the train we explore the places where it stops, mainly looking for the codes to bypass the magnetic locks that lock it when it stops, but it’s also a chance to find things. You go around finding money, weapons, ammunition, food, medkits and even survivors to take on the train with you. However, it’s not a walk in the park; you will get attacked by the infected (this beta has four different types, I assume there will be more) and they can be quite rough, especially when they are in groups. And conserving ammo is important, because you’ll be tight on it, fortunately you’ll be able to use certain objects around you to get rid of your enemies.
The parts in the train, are a bit more calm. In them we just walk around the train, checking that the systems are in order and that the passengers are ok. With time they will get hungry or sick so we have to manage our resources for them, as they can be quite scarce. Especially when it comes to medikits, if you get wounded while you’re out there and you use a medikit then that’s a medikit you won’t get to use during the train parts, and that’s something that could potentially come back to bite you in the ass.
After several stages alternating exploration and travelling, you’ll get to a big city and the passengers that are alive will give you money and items for taking them there. That city acts like a hub between chapters and you can replenish your items on different shops before your next mission, although the beta finished shortly after that.
The devs said that some of the things were just placeholders but I didn’t even notice that, I found this quite polished for an early beta. It’s true that the mechanics of handling the train systems were quite simple and that there weren’t options for choosing other routes, but I suspect that might just be one of those cases where the controls start getting more complex as the game goes on and that we might end up choosing alternate routes in the final product.
tinyBuild will be taking this game to E3 where they will be revealing more information about it and they have plans of releasing the final product over the summer. This beta left me wanting more so you can be sure that I will be reviewing this for you once it’s out.
Angry Spaniard, adoptive Irishman. Writer, reader, tea drinker and video game player/designer.
