The Final Station is a 2D action survival horror game developed by Oleg Sergeyev and Andrey Rumak and published by tinyBuild. This is a just a preview of the game, and it features only the first few levels and a sneak-peak at one of the cities.
Author: Sherlock Van Helsing
Steam: Released
Developer: Oleg Sergeev, Andrey Rumak, Do My Best
Publisher: tinyBuild
Genre: Post-apocalyptic adventure
Release date: 30 Aug, 2016
STORY
The game is set in a post-apocalyptic world where you play as a train conductor who, on his way to one of the last cities not overrun by monsters, stops plenty of times to gather fuel and resources. Wherever he goes, there are monsters, but also notes written during the apocalypse, as well as survivors who will join you on the train.
So far there isn’t enough to fully understand the story, but the ending of the preview points at something more twisted that is going on behind the scenes, and hopefully it won’t turn into the cliched “shadowy organization takes advantage of bad situation to get lots’o money”. What I do like is the dialogue between the survivors on the train: depending on who survives, they will have different conversations about them and the world that they are living in.
GRAPHICS
The 2D pixelated art style is pretty standard fare: it looks good and there is enough detail in every area you explore. However, most of the levels look the same, and it started to bore me a bit in the long run. The level design is interesting at first, but after a while you see the truth: every level is a linear path with one or two rooms optional rooms that you can open. This tends to take away from the whole immersion, and I hope that in the full game there will be multiple paths to choose to beat a level.
GAMEPLAY
Your main goal in each level is to find a note with a code that will refuel your train and make it move once again. The monsters that you fight are shadowy people, and in order to defeat them you can throw objects at them, hit them with your fists, or shoot them with your pistol or shotgun. But be careful, because ammo and resources are scarce.
When exploring a level you will also find food and medikits. These are used to protect and keep alive the survivors that are on your train: each one of them has a health and food meter that you need to keep up to keep them from dying. This leads to some interesting resource management, but it did get quite confusing since nobody explains how the whole system works, and I just started doing things randomly not knowing what I was supposed to do.
CHALLENGE
Most of the times you can either melee the monsters without wasting ammo by exploiting their AI, or you can try and run past them by sacrificing a bit of your health. The real challenge comes into play when you are trying to manage food and medikits between the survivors: not knowing what benefit they would bring in the end, I literally started ignoring those who were bleeding since giving them more health did nothing. This did get quite frustrating, and hopefully a small tutorial or hint will tell you how to act accordingly in each situation when the full game gets released.
SOUND
The sound effects are pretty decent, and there is no voice acting and not much music in the whole game.
REPLAYABILITY
Finding and saving survivors makes replaying the game(‘s preview) very interesting, and hopefully there will be multiple endings and hard choices to make in the final product.
Overall, The Final Station is a solid action/survival game that has a lot of potential. What needs to be improved is the level design and the tutorial. I would highly recommend this when on sale.
Story: 7
Graphics: 7
Gameplay: 8
Challenge: 8
Sound: 7
Replayability: 8
