The Last Spell

Easily my favorite modern strategy game.

Pros: Tons of viable build variety. Perfect difficulty. Plenty of tense moments. Style for days. Active devs who actually fix things when they are broken (or unfun)!

Cons: Levels can be very long (4 hours+ for end game missions) and it can be frustrating to die to a boss at the end and lose all that progress...but the game is a rogue-like so you're basically always leveling up something. Lick your wounds and give it another try!

Also, the DLCs are all great pick ups but they aren't mandatory, the game is very beatable with just the base weapons.

Glad I bumped into it- I have a bad habit of buying these kinda town building defense games before realising 'Oh... it's yet another rogue like where you're just trying to beat a high score... I want a goal'

I was fearful that was the case with this one, but there's levels, objectives, little cutscenes here and there and upgrades to help with each 'run'

Great fun so far

Good Game. Fun. Kinda Of Like A Warcraft 3 Tower Defence Game, Or Something With Heroes.
Pretty Diverse Builds And Mechanics And Game Play. 5*Star

An interesting mash up of genres that ultimately fails due to lack of content or variation. It's part tower defense, city builder, tactical RPG and roguelite. Runs take too long at 2-3 hours. Very little changes between runs or towns. Monsters feel same-y, tactics grow stale quickly, meta progression does not vary gameplay enough.

Initially addicting. Then disappointing. After defeating the harpies and moving on to the next city it was clear how grindy and monotonous the gameplay is.

Game is still good. I never stick with it as long as I probably should. The late game used to feel a bit tedious to me. Going to dive in for another 10+ hours though!

Stolen Realm's character customization, the strategic placement of Into the Breach all paired with a cozy/strategic base builder that reminds me of old SC2 Mauls...this game has everything I could ever love and I'm so happy it exists!!!

Initial Concerns

Honestly seeing the trailers I thought there would be to much going on at once for me to even comprehend but that wasn't the case. The game does a great job slowly introducing the mechanics. There are a lot of numbers flying in your face but some how I never felt overwhelm because of the passing. I found myself being forced to take my time carefully thinking about each move. This slow pace prevent the player from feeling overwhelmed and the moment you are comfortable with a set of mechanics introduces new ones, its perfect.

Amazing Customisation

I found the weapons and equipment to feel balance and not once felt "I gotta restart the run because I got bad initial weapons. Every time, I managed to work with what I got and slow create certain builds that would fit my hero out or gear available. All the different gear really opens up discovering what builds I'd want to create in the future.

My Experience

Man I'm finding this extremely addicting, I've only had the game for almost 2 days and I already have 15 hours. I beat the first area first try and just beat the second stage (lake area). It feels like a XCOM with base building mechanics. I found myself hording gold mines to build up a lot of money early game and can't really foresee not doing that.

Overall

I highly recommend buying this (bought it on sale) though be warned you will easily pass the 2 hour refund mark trying to see if you like it or not. Personally one of the best strategy games I've played and I'm not even finished.

A gem, been playing it on and off for quite some time now. worth every penny. Dev's have added quite a bit of content over the years too.

big fan, graphics might turn some people off but the game play is on point.

Great horde-smashing hybrid TRPG/base defense game. It's an odd combination of turn-based mass destruction and tactics, but it works great. The levels can be quite challenging, often sneaking through the end by the skin of your teeth, but your band of stinky misfits makes it to the last day it feels great. When you have a good build, you feel unstoppable.

Beautifully designed combination of Fort defense and RPG. Well thought out character skills and powers that are enjoyable to choose from. The tactics are fun and the character attacks are satisfyingly powerful.

If you like this game then go read "The Tyrant of the Tower Defense Game". I learned about this game in the comment section of this Manhwa, and this game and the Manhwa are basically the same thing. It's uncanny how similar both are.

Game is amazing. Beat First Haven on my first run, easy.

The best roguelike game ever made. Gameplay, music, and 2 beautiful daughters that definitely don't wanna kill u and take ur soul to destroy the whole world... Everything in this game makes u wanna play it for hundreds of hours.

I really like the gameplay. But this game gives me migraines. I've never experienced it with this intensity in a game before. There are no accessibility options, so I would like to warn other photosensitive people and neurodivergent people with sensory issues and recommend skipping this game.

This game has almost everything I could possibly want. Awesome music, incredible sound design, hordes of interesting and well-designed enemies, and tons of different, unique weapons to combat them with. It’s also got thoughtful resource management, surprisingly in-depth strategy, steady progression, and inherent challenge without being lazy or overwhelming. It’s quickly become one of my favorites.

But there’s one balancing issue that I hate, hate, HATE and it’s the perk trees. Heroes have access to a random and limited set of perk trees; some are randomly available and only have one path, but other trees are guaranteed for each hero yet come with one of two options along each tier. There’s a lot of varied and interesting perks you can get, but you never know which ones might be available for a given hero. Which would be fine, but it makes developing synergies a goddamn nightmare. “Oh, this hero has a quirk that lets them do extra poison damage? Too bad they don’t have the poison perk tree.” “This hero has tons of health and would make for an awesome tank! Doesn’t it suck that their melee perk tree doesn’t have a single tank-related perk?”

Furthermore, while the variety of weapons is truly a highlight, it can be a devil to find the weapons that would make a team member effective. If the poison quirk hero above doesn’t have the tree and you can’t find poison weapons, well, he’s not dealing poison damage in that game and essentially has a useless quirk, even if it was supposed to be positive. The same goes for stuns, blocking, debuffs, speed-based weapons, and tons of other mechanics that make the game fun but difficult to utilize to their full potential.

I’ve already spent hours in this game customizing my heroes and trying to min-max them, which has honestly been the most fun I’ve had in a game in a long time. But the reliable unreliability in developing proper synergies is a major sore spot for me.

this game is insanely good, like the best turn based combat i ve ever played. You ll not regret spending your salary on it if more content gets released.

One of the most fun Games i have played in a while. So much repeatability in sessions, where you can take your time in sessions. The sessions can go for so long and so much different kind of runs. Feels like a DND one shot every time you start playing a session.

Honestly price is worth it for how much content there is and updates are pretty consistent in my opinion. Music is 10/10,
Highly recommend to get this as soon as you can!!

A fun strategic combat game with some base-building and character progression.

You control a team of fighters who defend a town against hordes of creatures. Combat is turn based, with each fighter having a different range of attacks and moves based on what equipment they carry.

After each battle you get to level up, buy new gear and build up the town with defenses and new building (which can generate money, materials, new equipment and more).

The core gameplay loop is fun (if a little repetitive). Tackling loads and loads of enemies gives you the feeling of constantly being overrun, even if you will actually be fine in the end. Atmosphere is great. You can win with several builds and playstyles.

Features fun boss fights, each with a different vibe.

Some issues:

Deaths tend to come out of nowhere. There’s no log, so sometimes I really struggled to work out why someone died. Some enemies have ranged attacks, or are armour piercing, or stun your guy, or multiple archers can all target the same guy, or some explosive creature can have a different move to what you were expecting. It’s rare for your guys to get whittled down with small attacks, they’re usually fine until they’re suddenly dead, which can be frustrating.

It's long. I came to this from rogue-likes, but this is more of a campaign. Each town defense plays out over between 7 and 14 nights so you can generally count on at least 10 hours or more play to get through a full town defense. It took me over 100hrs to beat the four towns once (with 2 reattempts). Not a bad thing in and of itself, but my two losses were quite frustrating – both falling victim to unexpected sudden deaths mentioned above, after a lot of time sunk into them.

Not sure the first town is the best introduction to the game. It’s good at not giving you too much to do straight away, but because most of the buildings, weapons, defenses etc are gated behind unlocks it meant that for several nights I had a distinct “is this all there is to this?” feeling. Immediately upon starting the second town there were a ton of new building options and I was re-engaged, but it’s not the best first impression.

Easy recommend despite these issues. Not sure I’ll be back to play through all the difficulty levels, but good fun all the same.

the progression is pretty good, but the game just isn't fun imo. In a strange way its kinda like playing 2-4 different games of tetris at once

If you like tactical RPGs and/or Tower Defense, this game is for you.

Love this turn based combat, great mechanics, quite unique!

I've tried it. The mechanics are good. It has many of the elements I like in a roguelite, including ample metaprogression (I like it done this way, many don't). But I'm not continuing. The theme and aesthetic just aren't doing it for me. This is purely subjective, and I'm not going to penalize the game for that.

Time-melter game. Love it. Gets me that "into the breach" feeling, but with a lot more choices.

Absolutley amazing and well made game, one of my favorites actually

The game is an unusual combination of genres, but the price to content ratio is a joke and deserves reprimand.

The soundtrack SLAPS 11/10
Gameplay is top notch and you can make it as difficult (or easy) as you want!

Love it to bits.

Music slaps, gameplay loop is pretty fun. It is a bit slow at times but it is a fun game for a reasonable price.

The game mechanics is amazing. Each combat is random both character and map so the battle is not repetitive. No class for characters so you can equip any weapons and the attack point is matched between the weapon and your status point. You can mix and match between weapons like I am like-mage but i carry bow so i have "attack move set" of wand and also bow so it's create more creative move you can play within one character. Right now, I am struggling to balance between using resources in "defend base" or "hero-building".

This game is great, challenging turn-based tactics i ever play.

Fun, this game is simply fun, kill zombies with different spells and weapons and survive impossible odds.

Good game, but too much randomness, especially when you consider the fact that each run can take more than 5 hours.
游戏是个好游戏，但是考虑到每一关要花好几个小时，随机性实在太强了，对游戏体验很不好。

the gameplay loop gets old fast, but you have to grind, and grind, and grind, and grind, and grind, and grind, and grind, and grind, and grind endlessly to get anywhere.

Drags you in heavier than civilizatiin6. One more turn effect. No grind no donate, nice chalange

I really want to like this game, but the more I play it, the more random freezes I get, and the longer they are. I truly do not understand what about this game could be so hard for it to compute that it's freezing for 15 seconds while everything else on my computer is running fine in the background. It's become unplayable.

Also, I don't get how people are saying it takes so long to defend a town. I almost completed the first town around 3 hours after starting the game for the first time.

Highly impressed by the game, its fun and engaging
Really good balance between managing resources and combat, good rpg character sheets and rng for the roguelike.

Honsetly its one of those few cases where I would recommend it even without a discount, if you're thinking about it JUST DO IT!

Very fun and nuanced (once through the first town) on team builds. It is a bit meta to just maximize crossbows with Multi hit buffs but it is very fun figuring out the best composition. Game can be a bit repetitive and the maps are all the same. Overall, a good game to get on sale.

Fantastic combat and city building aspects. I feel like the amazing 1:40 video on the Steam page showed how much love they put into the game. Would highly recommend

this is lots of fun! would recommend to anyone who likes defence type games and base building + hero upgrading

I have not played this many hours yet, I have only gone through 3 maps. But I can tell you it rocks harder than its intro music track.... just buy it and play "one more turn" until the morning...

What a fun game, but the base game feels incomplete. The DLCs ad things that should be in the base game and are not worth the extra cash. Do not buy this game unless on deep discount.

I really like this game. I haven't really played much of this genre (as I dont even know what its called), but the closest to this game for me is "into the breach". (Rec games like this please guys thx)

Pros:
Every decision matters a lot. I am constantly taking ages because I deliberate on every decision. Especially in the end game, I am constantly keeping track of hero positioning, minimizing dmg taken, maximizing dmg dealt, optimal loot selection, base layout, best economy/military approach (early game), champ synergies etc.

Game is challenging enough to make me have to think but not too hard. Its not that hard personally, but a lot of reviewers seem to have trouble with it.

Drafting weapons so you don't clutter the pool.

Balance of the weapons is pretty good.

Cons:
One game is really long. It usually takes me like 14 hours (i play lying down with no mouse so for most it'll probably take like 10h). Because of this, one loss late game can be devasting (thankfully, despite winning 3 missions I haven't lost a game after the third wave (and most were because I accidentally killed my own unit). I thought I was going to lose the 2nd mission (a unit got 100% dmg reduction and I really had almost no ways to counter it) and the 3rd mission (due to the difficultly and shit build), it just felt terrible because of the amount of time you commited to that mission

The boss is a lot harder than previous rounds. You'll think obviously but I keep on going into the final wave thinking my team is OP, often usually doing the last few waves with no mana on the 2nd apocalypse level. Also the boss are not really intuitive what you are supposed to do vs. them. I recommend reading on the wiki what they do so you don't waste 10hours of progress.

Rounds kinda feel similar. I played like 50h in like 5 days so yeah... but the game can feel a bit repetitive sometimes (ik thats just me playing too much). Also with this, there feels like a lot of times where I just want to go the same build/comp as previous rounds because its pretty easy to go into that. While there is different perk trees and stat changes to each character, its not that varied that I feel like going something that seems less good but is more tailored to the RNG character I get.

Game wastes a lot of time. there are a bunch of small things that just waste time (ie. opening the progression things take a while because I have to watch cut-scenes). Deleting corpses because they block your way takes waaay too long. Things like how it can be hard to find which spot has vision of a particular enemy, so you just check every score and undo the move every time you can't hit them.

Some other minor thigns like punished for killing enemies too fast (corpses being erased as the borders move in), bad interface sometimes (there are only 2 zooms and i want a middle of them), etc.

Final Fantasy Tactics meets Hades, meets Faster Than Light, meets Darkest Dungeon. I blink and two hours are gone in an evening. It's got that, "One more turn" energy from Civilization and then you're down a rabbit hole. Think a few moves ahead and you'll do alright.

Good game, not for everyone. Also easy game to play when you have a broken arm.

I was quite interested in this game from it's Steam page footage but it is TRASH. The writing is either literally as generic as it's humanly possible to be, spouting tired memes or Monty fucking Python references. The art style needs to bog off back to Tumblr where it came from. Tutorial starts me off with a pretty girl with an undercut covered with scars staring off into the middle distance, another girl described in her traits as 'chubby' with a shit eating grin and dual weilding hammers, and... a flabby, soft, non intimidating shapeless man with a curly moustache somewhere in the background. Then the game starts banging on about how the DLC I bought was something something adding dwarfish racial diversity and somewhere in all the tripe I've mentioned to you here and more I realized I'd just paid 15 quid to read some SJW's first hideous attempts at writing.

Don't get me wrong, it's more than just that. The gameplay elements have all been done elsewhere and better, the flow feels stunted and all around it really is just a game that belongs on mobile phone but with a huge price hike to play it.

But realistically it's the art that makes me want to break a chairleg over the bridge of someone's nose. I was enthusiastic to play this and I walked away ANGRY. That is not a good sign. I never return games because I can't help myself and always feel like it was just going to get good if I stuck around past the two hour mark but this vomit in sheep's clothing leaves me in no doubt that if I stuck around to 'see if it gets good' I'd probably wind up drunk and/or violent. I would genuinely sooner play the ET game that got buried in the desert. I tried getting through oldschool Daggerfall (dosbox version) recently and the game irreperably broke on me after I grinded it hard for the whole week, and somehow this game has a kind of awful that still hits me like a half brick in a sock even after that traumatic shambles.

Fantastic art style, soundtrack, and overall design/feel. The story is pretty basic, but delivered fairly well and woven organically into core gameplay mechanics. Honestly, this is a fun indie experience with a lot of heart.

That said, it started to feel repetitive pretty quick, so while I'm positive on TLS and would happily buy a bigger-better-faster sequel, it's still important to acknowledge some of the limitations here. I'd love to see them introduce more varied scenarios and more complex and powerful towers and other defenses in addition to the heroes.

Very nice game! I was a bit worried at first from screen shots. Seemed a bit too overwhelming to me with all the stats, UI elements and enemies on screen. But once you get into the game it's all extremely digestible for anyone who has a familiarity with RPG elements. Plus the intro tutorial does an excellent job breaking all the systems down in about 30 minutes. Once you get through that, you're basically up and rolling!

The gameplay is super satisfying and this is a really great second monitor type of game. Something you can play and enjoy while maybe watching a show or stream in the background. Very excited to have picked this up and looking forward to putting some good hours into it!

Superb indie gem! Lots of replayability, nice pixel visuals and a concept that's between a TD and a rogue-like tactics.

Awesome mix of builder, medieval, tactical, squad, tbs, meta, city defence.

this is absolutely a very niche type of game, but I think it's very good and the soundtrack is excellent. I only wish unlocks were a little faster without needing to use boundless mode.

I cannot think of the last time I enjoyed playing a video game this much in the last 5 years.

I really don't know if you really read all comments! (maybe in discord?) but i very much hope you read my small review.

There isn't a single game that scratches the itch The Last Spell does.

It's a perfectly crafted turn-based tower defense game that is a PLEASURE to play. No other game capture this satisfying upgrade base loop, and the desolate feeling of having a few heroes to defend such mighty hordes. Strategy is high, game is deterministic in most areas and highly difficult! which is good.

I only wish for a more butter smooth gui, maybe i'm failing to appeal to an intentional low fps gui aesthetic. how about a toggable option?

Keep up the good work!

A truly excellent game. Just slightly too repetitive to be among the crème de la crème when it comes to strategy games.