If you are thinking about buying the game, and want to see what people don't like about it. Look no further! I got you!
I have read all 85 negative reviews that have been written in time of this review. Here are some insides!

39 of the people giving this game a bad review played the game for less than 2 hours.
For more than 10 hours there are only 20 reviews, 10 of them in chinese.

I will divide frequent complaints into two groups based on time played, and comment on each of them.

0-5 hours complains
“The game is anti-russian propaganda” (mostly in russian)
“combat isn't tactical, there are not any abilities (they are, but you cannot know that, if you did literally one level)
“Stealth doesn't work” (Stealth does work. You just need to actually hide in some bush and be quiet lmao)
“Machine guns are killing my soldiers” (They do that, yeah. Mostly in real life tho)
“The game isn't in english, doesn’t have manual save, weapons have limited range” (wtf?)
“Game doesn't launch” (Ok this actually sucks, i feel sorry about you)

5+ hours complains
“Game is anti-communist propaganda” (In chinese this time)
“game is too easy” (try to save scum less)
“game is too hard” (try to use save button)
“game is unbalanced” (Ok, snipers are broken, but really fun)
“combat is shallow” (To be fair, if you are looking for hardcore tactical strategies, there are better candidates on the market for you. But this game is not just about the tactical fights. It has many more things to it, and the fights aren’t even the main focus. Even though, i wouldn't call them shallow)
“UI is terrible, and i have to do everything manually” (I honestly don´t find the UI to be bad, but it is true that some QoL changes would be appreciated)
“game is buggy” (I have in fact found some annoying bugs, but in my opinion, talking about optimization and state of release, this game is still in the better half)


In conclusion, There are few semi-valid points around. Some classes feel stronger than others, and AI is truly braindead sometimes (It would be really cool if they would react on death bodies, but that would make the game much, much harder) But overall? I feel that at least 70 out of 85 negative reviews weren't justified. The game is great, and you definitely should try it. It literally has a 5 hour free demo so go for it.

As for me now, I am going to touch some grass before returning to my favourite cozy train game about shooting bolsheviks.

I'm happy to recommend Last Train Home. Published by THQ Nordic, it's a fictionalized telling of the Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion, a remarkable military campaign set in the midst of the Russian Revolution. I didn’t know this story, though it’s clearly important to the developers at Ashborne, whose home office is in Brno, Czech Republic.

Last Train Home initially presents itself as a historical squad-command real time strategy game, akin to Company of Heroes. In the game’s first moments, the player controls a team of soldiers, made up of the normal combat roles. There’s a rifleman, a grenadier, a medic, and so on. Each class has its strengths: the sniper can scout into the fog of war; the machine gunner can set up his weapon to anticipate enemy approaches. The players’ troops can be ordered to wander around the game’s gritty but varied maps, speaking with civilians, collecting loot, and attacking enemy positions. These engagements require careful deployment and thoughtful attention to adversaries’ abilities. (That said, there are some balancing issues: snipers are ridiculously powerful, and the enemy AI occasionally blunders hilariously.)

This game’s combat compares well with that of THQ Nordic’s recent publication, Jagged Alliance 3. Both utilize squad gameplay to highlight characters’ distinctive abilities, especially against superior enemy forces. What I most dislike about JA3 is the impossibility of pausing time to give orders before engaging in combat. LTH smartly reverses this decision, allowing the player to pause at any time. Without an ability to think through a battle’s opening stages, my combat engagements regularly wind up as frantic affairs. Allowing the player to pause and strategize respects the game’s tactical promises.

Oh, I fear I’ve buried the lede: Between missions, instead of returning to a fortified base or warping to the next battle, the troops pile into a controllable, upgradable train.

I grew up near Chicago, home of folk singer-songwriter Steve Goodman. His best-known tune, notably recorded by Arlo Guthrie and Willie Nelson, is “The City of New Orleans,” a song about a real-life train that runs 19 hours overnight from Illinois, down through Memphis, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Goodman refers to the vehicle as a “magic carpet made of steel,” and he contrasts its industrious glide with the decay he sees along its journey, as they pass “the graveyards of the rusted automobiles.”[1] A similar dichotomy–the lively engine, the desolate countryside–is at the heart of Last Train Home.

While the Red Army has pillaged portions of rural Russia in the name of the people, the Czechoslovak Legion utilizes and ultimately controls the rails, maintaining their train as it treks eastward, on toward Vladivostok. (If you’re unaware of European and Asian geography, then-extant Czechoslovakia was to the west of Russia. The Legion went east to get west, arriving at a seaport approximately 15,000 kilometers away from their home territory.)

In the train phase, as the locomotive chugs along, the player must attend to upkeep and logistics. The focus on individual soldiers drops away, except as they play overall roles: some are cooks, some doctors, others engineers. Giving out assignments and interacting with characters’ needs and abilities can be a little fiddly, but with a little scouring of the menus, this gameplay becomes generally intuitive. At your command, the troops address the business of running the train, stoking the locomotive’s fire and repairing cracked cars. The "pistons keep on churnin' / and the wheels go 'round and 'round."[2] At times, the train discovers notable areas, and troops can be deployed to forage or barter. Success in these events depends on soldiers' traits. An empathetic doctor won’t happily hunt, but a better-suited character will gladly harvest scads of flesh.

When the fuel stockpile is full, the hospital car empty[3], and the soldiers seemingly enjoying their relaxation, the train’s progress can feel nearly idyllic. I found myself noting, “I've been happy lately, thinking about the good things to come, and I believe it could be something good has begun."[4] But it never lasts. Inevitably something goes wrong, the food runs low, someone damages the locomotive, and suddenly LTH resonates with the style of the equally depressing Frostpunk or perhaps the tone of This War of Mine. Do the children go work in the generator? Are the refugees sent away? Which soldiers starve this week? The game presents impossibly weighty choices, and the player recognizes the difficulty of the command position, realizing that to play this game is to be “living with something that just isn't fair.”[5]

A complaint in the current Steam reviews is the game’s political biases. Is it anti-communist? Is it pro-communist? These questions are absurd. The game is a fictionalized telling of the Legion’s exploits but not egregiously so: in this setting, the politics are partially determined. Individual soldiers have ideological commitments, but the game’s movements follow history. The Legion didn’t adopt the Revolution’s goals, namely the “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.”[6] To expect otherwise would be to shift the story to alternate history, which isn’t this game’s intent.

What I love about LTH is the introduction to other people’s important stories. Like most Americans, I’m ignorant of the rest of the world’s history. I know twentieth century Europe primarily through the lens of American involvement, the military heroism taught to me in my school years and by Tom Hanks. My limitations become even more pronounced when I focus on particular countries. What do I know about the Czech? Franz Kafka lived in Prague, but don’t quote me on it. I now know a little more about the Czechoslovak Legion and their incredible struggle to get out of Russia, to find their way back home. This story matters to people who aren't me, but I appreciate our common humanity.

Much contemporary media mines history for stories worth telling while taking such narrative liberties that the player winds up with nothing of historical value. Consider the mass of Assassin’s Creeds. Though ach installment introduces players to a flashy past setting–Ptolemaic Egypt, the Italian Renaissance, etc.–the learning is sketchy at best. These settings are all familiar enough: they have resonance to sell the games to a major market segment. Quasi-historical games like those use their source material primarily as attention-grabbing background and forgettable plot fixtures (behold, Athens; behold, George Washington!).

Historical video games are at their best when they connect the player to important and compelling history that’s at risk of otherwise being lost. Or, as Tom Waits warns, "[M]emory's like a train. You can see it getting smaller as it pulls away, and the things you can't remember tell the things you can't forget."[7]

Recommended.*
—
1. Steve Goodman, “City of New Orleans,” track 7 on Steve Goodman, Buddah Records, 1975.
2. The Doobie Brothers, “Long Train Runnin’,” track 2 on The Captain and Me, Warner Bros., 1973.
3. cf. Sylvia Plath, “And the men, what is left of the men / Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood / Into the next mile, / The next hour.” “Getting There,” in Ariel, Faber and Faber, 1965.
4. Yusuf Islam [Cat Stevens], “Peace Train,” track 10 on Teaser and the Firecat, A&M, 1971.
5. Ozzy Osbourne, “Crazy Train,” track 2 on Blizzard of Ozz, Jet, 1983.
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, "Manifesto of the Communist Party," Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969.
7. Tom Waits, “Time,” track 9 on Rain Dogs, Island Records, 1985.
* I considered quoting the American pop rock band Train, but that seemed gratuitous.

I wholeheartedly recommend this game as it is a very enjoyable, beautiful mix of survival, train and people management simulator akin to Frostpunk and tactical RTS. Below you will find my observations and reservations about the game in detail.

- Beautiful graphic art and music. Especially models which look awesome.

- Tiny details like seeing your soldiers play cards, sleep, cook, take care of injured etc.

- Really enjoyable fusion of Frostpunk genre (train part) and tactical RTS genre and I found both very enjoyable.

- The mood of the game is awesome and you may even slowly grow attached to certain soldiers as result

- Each mission feels unique and very often reflects terrain of the map from the train-part.

- Money is really tight, especially in the first part of the game so you really struggle and I loved it.

- AI for combat is really good - enemies use covers, try to out-flank you, use grenades, occupy stationary heavy weapons if it helps them. Like, it tends to be challenging to win a fight once enemies get alerted to your presence - so that's great.

- Realistic voices are awesome, with soldiers talking in their native tongue - I would only welcome an option to have Russian voices even for story dialogues (subbed of course) as they are voiced with Russian accent only (played the Czech version)

- Replay-ability - there are 2 main decisions which road to take and on the one I took I also had to choose from 2 roads, so possibly my next play-through will be quite different.

- Tutorial is lacking important parts - like for example how to enter stealth mode (it tells you only to perform stealth kill not how to do it)

- Tactical combat is missing very important elements like an order "do not shoot until ordered" or "lock to cover" as especially at the beginning I struggled with estimating firing distance, and would often order my soldier, who was in cover, to shoot at an enemy, only to see him run out of cover into the open and fire at the enemy - of course he would immediately get downed.

- Stealth AI is severely lacking (maybe intentionally?)
A) when they spot your soldier but only briefly, they do not check the spot where they saw them - no, they only walk a few steps closer, stare for a couple of seconds and then walk away, back to their position / to resume their patrol. This can be easily abused to lure out soldiers, making the "Throw a rock" ability completely obsolete (what is even worse that sometimes the AI doesn't even react to it)

B) when you kill someone in stealth, enemies are not alarmed to find their friend dying right next to them - they act only as if they heard / saw something briefly.

C) when you snipe someone from a group of enemies, his comrades will run towards your position in alarmed state, but that state soon turns off, if they don't find your soldier immediately, and start to act as if nobody died - they even play the same replies as if they were just imagining things.

- Story is fictive but at the same time quite confusing and ill explained - I wish devs went for more historical accuracy - it would be still super interesting and educative on top of that. Like for example the stress on neutrality while I am asked to help the whites all the time? Being told that Whites are my enemies now, only to have the next mission helping them out, then to have them called my allies and then again they are suddenly enemies? It wasn't properly explained in the game that White movement was fractured into various groups with their own agendas and each group had their own (often shifting) attitude towards the legionnaires.

- I also wonder if no Czechoslovak legionary committed any crime (except for theft I guess) - because it certainly felt very black and white, with holier than saints legionaries and genocidal reds. I know that Red Army indeed committed many war crimes, even atrocities on civilian population but It would be great to have a more complex picture - with some reds showing their humanity and compassion too, and at the same time, the legionaries showing they were just flawed human beings like the rest of us.

- Encyclopedia is very brief, does not address what is fiction in the game and what the reality was (except for the Tsar's gold) + does not explain that legionnaires were not merely POW but that they actively fought against Austria-Hungarian armies but could not return home due to Bolsheviks ending hostilities with Austria-Hungarian Empire - that is the reason, why they were fully armed (POWs would not have weapons).

- Missing Iron-man option to prevent me from loading a game (sometimes the temptation is just too high + there should be an achievement for finishing the game on Iron-man + perma-death.

- And last but not least, I encountered some minor bugs that should have been fixed by a patch this long after coming out. The bug of fallen legionnaire coming back to life after loading a save file only to see them die again was really creepy, though. And for some reason I was awarded with achievements for not having anyone die during the journey, despite 2 of my legionnaires dying.
But I didn't get achievement for cooking goulash 10 times, which I did many more times.

But all in all, I am thankful this game was made, I enjoyed it quite a lot and I am looking forward to my next play-through and the DLC Legion-tales!

Is this game a masterpiece? Yes, but it is a challenging management game with some good looking RTS missions. You want to travel from the Russian western border to Prague... actually not far, just a few hundred kilometers. Unfortunately, there are no train tickets at the moment. Well, we'll just go via Vladivostok and then return by ship across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

You don't control the whole legion, just a tiny unit. Initially, you have around 15 men at your disposal. This is explained in the story by saying that you are only the last stragglers of the legion. Accordingly, on your journey you will always find other scattered soldiers who join you. You can find up to three more soldiers in the very first mission. If a man dies, he is permanently dead. If a man is injured, this affects his morale and, above all, his performance. You should therefore take it easy on him and ideally put him in the ambulance wagon. Hopefully your doctor (you have one, don't you?) is well rested and has sufficient healing supplies. If your unit shrinks below six men, you've lost the game. Likewise, if your unit's morale drops too dramatically. The simulation of your individual soldiers is extremely detailed. Perhaps even a little too detailed, because you really have to analyze and consider many things. Each of your soldiers has their own name and values for health, morale and stamina. They also have different character traits, positive or negative. Thief, monarchist, good fisherman, etc... Each soldier has a military rank (there are only 7 of them), each soldier can be assigned to a day shift and a night shift in the train. Your soldiers have certain job skills (doctor, scout, infantryman, machine gunner, cook, etc., although good people can learn many of these roles), each has their own weapon, each has their own special skills for the real-time part of the game (use machine gun, scout area with binoculars, assault with bayonet, heal, throw grenades, etc...), each has five different attributes (fitness, dexterity, intelligence, willpower and charisma).

You have to assemble units, which are then sent on missions. Some of the (optional) missions simply take place on the overview map and are handled with texts including multiple choice options, others lead to real-time strategy missions. In addition, many of your people have to work on the train, of course, and anyone who is sent on a mission after having just worked a night shift as a coal shoveler won't find this very funny. You can also put individual soldiers on half rations or even deny them any food. In Siberia, it will be freezing cold, making frostbite an issue. You can regulate the heating in individual wagons differently. As you can see, the whole thing is pretty complex. If you don't enjoy these team management details, you'll despair.

The train consists of the locomotive and several different wagons. Additional wagons can be added during the game. Initially, we have an armored personnel carrier, an armored cannon wagon (including machine guns), an ambulance wagon and a wagon for storing supplies. Other wagons include, for example, a kitchen or a workshop to produce new items. We need a wide variety of supplies - food for the soldiers, fuel for the train, money to buy things along the way, wood for repairs, metal, cloth, herbs and gunpowder. There is also a huge amount of ready-made consumables, from various weapons to different types of ammunition, medical equipment, different food supplies and even vital vodka.

The train travels along the tracks towards the east, but you can't go back. The game also runs in real time on the zoomable overview map, and time can be accelerated or paused completely. We can stand still, travel at normal speed or drive at full throttle, which of course requires different resources. Wagons become defective and need to be serviced. Each position on the train should be occupied by one of our soldiers, with a day shift and a night shift. Or not, but without an assigned crew, we can't request the cannons as external support for a mission, for example.

The challenge is not so much the real-time missions, but above all the resource management. You find new soldiers, but have to leave them behind because there is no more room on the train. Your unit consists only of wounded soldiers, but you have no ambulance, doctor or medicine. Your train is at a standstill because you have run out of fuel. Your people are freezing to death in your wagons without heating. Your people are starving because there is nothing to eat. You have no money to buy new wagons, medical services or other resources, there aren't even any more goods to trade...

Conclusion:
Lead a military unit aboard an armored train through the unforgiving wilderness of Siberia in the midst of the Russian Civil War. Manage your crew and resources and try to survive and eventually reach the saving harbor in Vladivostok. The crew and platoon management is very detailed. The real-time strategy missions are fought with just a few soldiers and require a lot of micromanagement.

Alright. Long Train Home is done and dusted. This game was kinda insane. I guess it’s based on a true story which I'm not really familiar with, but the premise is you’re an officer of a Czech detachment making it’s way back to their soon to be officially recognized independent nation. However, to get there, you have to travel through Russia and Siberia during the Russian Civil War. And since air travel wasn't really a thing, you’re crossing this wartorn territory on a train.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3158959477

You’re on a train, everyone obviously knows more or less how to find you, and since you’re Czech, and your nation is taking the opportunity to secede from Russia, your reception is a mixed bag and you’ll have frequent encounters. Plus, the tracks run through many cities and towns.

Things start with a Russian general demanding that your CO, a major, surrender your weapons. He refuses, is killed by the general who then flees from your soldiers. Not before blowing up your first train and most of your detachment of course. As the surviving ranking officer, it’s your job to acquire a new train with your surviving soldiers and an advisor you were here to pick up anyway.

This is functionally the tutorial. Afterwards, the game is all about your journey to Vladivostok, where you and your soldiers will be able to catch a ship home. Along the way, you’ll add cars to your train, fortify and otherwise upgrade your train; your soldiers will gain experience from various tasks and missions, earning new promotions and leveling up. You’ll also help a number of people you come across, and fight many many battles.

Your soldiers can learn up to six professions, which are the classes in this game. There are five combat professions: rifleman, machine gunner, scout, grenadier, medic; and four non combat professions: worker, engineer, cook, doctor. All are important. Riflemen can get over barricades to bayonet enemies. Machine Gunners can set up a devastating field of fire. Scout are snipers. Grenadiers like blowing stuff up. Medics are medics lol. Workers maintain the train and handle upgrades. Engineers operate the train. Doctors handle post mission injuries as well as illnesses. Cooks…ummm…cook.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3158959321

From the above, having everybody learn worker and engineer is IMPORTANT. Everyone works in day/night shifts and can’t attend to their duties if they’re hurt or sick and struggle with their duties if they’re tired or suffering from PTSD. So having as large a pool of soldiers as possible to choose from will keep your train up and running.

For missions, you can have no less than three and no more than ten soldiers in your squads. You can have several squads handling various missions at any moment. You can mix and match soldiers and squads or disband and reform them to your heart's content. Your soldiers will need to hunt, forage, fish, cut lumber, search abandoned settlements, and trade for supplies, food, weapons, ammo; and these all factor into the survival mechanics. Your soldiers can starve, freeze, get upset and run off. Their morale will fluctuate. Managing your soldiers and your train is about half the game.

Combat missions are the other half of the game. This is where the RTS part of the game comes into play. It’s actually real time with pause, feels more like XCOM, and while there will be some run and gun moments, stealth rules supreme. It’s very easy to get your people killed if you’re not cautious.

The star of combat IMO was the Scout profession, and specifically the combo of camouflage and critical hit traits. As your soldiers level up a combat profession, it’ll unlock traits (perks). You can have up to four traits active per soldier. Additionally, each profession has a preferred weapon type, and each weapon type has three rankings. Rank 3 weapons being top shelf. You’ll acquire these as you progress.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3158959221

There are even more systems at play in this game, but this review is already becoming a novel, lol. Suffice to say, this game does require a mental investment from the player, and tactical thinking in and out of battle is king.

There are a couple broken achievements, and you definitely can’t earn all cheevos regardless, in a single playthrough. You won’t even see all the scenarios in one playthrough. So, if you’re a completionist, expect to be well into the hundreds of hours. My single playthrough lasted almost sixty hours. And did not overstay its welcome.

I played on the Steam Deck and it functioned fine. Text was small, but were it not for that, this would easily have earned Verified status. There were a handful of late game instances of FPS drops, but they weren’t significant and didn’t last more than a couple seconds each. I made heavy use of the tracking pad with this title, consider that to be your mouse, main triggers to be your L/R clicks, A for pause, B for camera rotation.

This game was gifted to me, but having said that, it more than earns its asking price and if you are looking for an intense and involved experience, this is the game for you.

LTH was the best surprise during the last Steam's Next Fest. The gameplay blends perfectly ingredients from different strategy branches: it's a real time strategy when on the ground exploring, looting and approaching enemies; it's a real time tactics while in battle, due to the tactical pause and the possibility to make really stealth kills; and it's also a resources/squad management inside the train.

Furthermore, both the art concept and the immersive sound are beautifully crafted. Everything is wrapped by a captivating storytelling, which can add another layer for those who like strategy RPG's too.

Since I played the (very generous) demo I was counting down the days untill the release. I just bought the digital deluxe to support this great work, now it's time to board the train and make my way to the end.

***I have 5 hours of playtime in the demo, which was like an early access, I just wanted to post a review as soon as I bought to share it with other strategy players, that's why the playtime of this review is short.

This is a fantastic game and a great example of why demo's should still be playable before full release of the game. I found this game by accident and fell in love with the demo and have literally counted the hours until I could continue my journey... Just a shame I had to start at the beginning again, but it is so enjoyable that I didn't mind overly.

If Frostpunk and Company of Heroes had a baby...that's exactly what this is. If you like those and Great War themes, this scratches that itch quite well.

I am Czech. I am a history buff and I love this game. Right up my alley with the mood, theme, gameplay and everything. The live action scenes are absolutely superb and completely absorb you into the story. You will create a relationship with your soldiers over time and the story that unfolds is an amazing experience. Congratulations to Ashborne for creating such an amazing piece of art and game.

There are of course some things I would love to see changed or improved. Firstly, the vertical fighting doesn't work well - I got into situations where enemies could shoot me from below, but my soldiers couldn't shoot down from a bridge. Next up are some little inconsistencies with breaking sneaking mode. Sometimes a stealth kill puts you out of stealth, sometimes it won't break it. Same goes with synced shots. Probably my biggest complaint would be the speed of or rather the absence of quick load. The game is sometimes very complex and I just wanna try if something works and load the game quickly if it doesn't. Loading the game takes quite some time. I would also like to rename squads or at least colour them or change icons.

This game is definitely worth your time and money even if you're not really into the genre.

This is what I wanted from Metro Exodus.