The Last Haven - Surviving the Radioactive Heat

How many times have we, the players, been asked to survive a nuclear war? The post-apocalypse setting is one of the most popular, but the truly memorable works are one and a half. Cliches, predictability, and one-size-fits-all mechanics are far from a complete list of the subgenre's ills. It would seem that the developers should at least jump out of their pants to surprise the frequenters of radioactive wastelands.

This time the developers from Thunder Devs turned out to be brave with an ambiguous cocktail of genres. The Last Haven is not just another survival game, but also a real-time strategy game. Surviving the Aftermath already did that; was the cocktail of Coke nukes and melted, radioactive snow delicious...?

Boredom wanders among the ruins of civilization

The first thing that catches your eye with The Last Haven is the indirect controls, a similar mechanic was in Frostpunk. This is also where the basis of the gameplay is taken from - "community survival". That is, you need to feed the colonists, take care of the settlement and gradually develop it. The player will be opposed by hackneyed dilemmas: feral animals, marauders and the regular army that got out of hand. From the more mundane problems - hunger, cold, disease and the gradually growing popular discontent. You can't control the inhabitants directly, only assign tasks, which sometimes leads to ridiculous problems. Which ones? About that later.

But you can control a self-proclaimed army and police force. Self-proclaimed, because the laws of the settlements in The Last Haven are written with a stick in the water, people were united only by misfortune. Who has a gun and who in a past life may have served in law enforcement, that little man will be the informal leader ... under the control of the player. Such a little man with a gun knows how to shoot, throw grenades, collect objects and drive a car. But the first time you take such a little man under control, you start to think about the game...

Controlled units have a whole set of skills and actions, four gradually decreasing scales with health, hunger, heat and radiation exposure, three slots for weapons, body armor and headgear, but... only four buttons are really used, one of which is the left mouse button, and the rest are crammed into the keyboard. Overloaded interface is not due to the depth of mechanics, the units can not be fine-tuned, working out the tactics of the game. Even changing weapons and equipment is a hassle.

But when it comes to controlled unit objectives, The Last Haven turns into a painfully familiar survival game. What does it take to survive? Gather supplies that are plentifully lying on the ground, fight off zombies and wild animals, and defend the settlement from assorted plagues. It is noteworthy that all events can be regulated, the activity of the devil - to adjust for yourself. Even such a characteristic as weather, and it can be adjusted.

Weather is a separate kind of enemy. At first, The Last Haven might not seem like a bad city-building simulator at all, but...The Last Haven is Thunder Devs first game. What doesn't happen in a developer's debut games? That's right - there's no real variation in them, because it's a separate, high art form to implement engaging builds and branching story progressions in a game. The Last Haven cannot boast of this.

To survive, you have to build in the same order from time to time - no imagination. Breaking the order, the player risks discovering on day 80 of survival that his settlement can no longer be saved - a very unpleasant moment. It's one thing when you replay a bad day, another thing - to completely screw up the passage of 6 hours, because the game decided so, she wanted so. So what learning is almost non-existent. The player is told: here's the warehouse, here's the sawmill, and then...you can do it. The Last Haven is a game with serious hardcore overtones, but is complexity born in the methodical repetition of an algorithm rather than the ability to adapt to any conditions in the shortest possible time...?

The post-apocalypse world is surprisingly small

Winter is coming. And not just any winter, but a nuclear winter. One of the main problems of The Last Haven is global cooling. The climate change mechanic is one of the most interesting. Having started the game in greenhouse conditions, the player soon discovers that the huts he built in the settlement are not heated. People begin to freeze, then fall ill, and if no action is taken, die. The inevitability of the wildest frosts dictate the terms of the game. The situation varies depending on the starting location and the initial settings, but even on the easiest level of difficulty to forget about the problem of heating is not possible.

How to prepare to swim in Cocytus? Act solely as the game thinks, namely: search the map...

...to fight off all waves of enemies...

...and gradually pump up the research branch. It seems to be a typical gameplay, nothing remarkable, but you should pay attention to the way research is studied, you feel the familiar smell of the mid-twenties...

And the thing is that research is not studied for resources, but for time. The simpler ones have 24 hours of in-game time, the important ones have 74 hours. You can speed up the process, but this also requires improvement. What to occupy yourself with while exploring? Nothing. If the map is studied, everything is fine - feel free to speed up the time by half, thanks to the game allows. Can you smell that? I think it smells like a smartphone strategy game.

But do not worry, because this is the first location. It is only necessary to understand the laws of the game, then the survivors will go on to conquer new lands, and there - the field of unploughed lands. Right?

...Alas, no. Travelling to other locations looks like this: the player gathers a group of people, presses a button, and the group itself wanders to the selected locations. Nothing depends on the player during the walks. Either the research group will return on the shield if you give it a normal ammunition, or under the shield if you equip people lousy. That is, the entire game is three locations with no opportunity to explore all of the post-apocalyptic lands. It's blasphemy to demand that an indie game be big, but The Last Haven isn't even an indie game, it's a browser-based strategy game...

Conclusions

The Last Haven will suit unassuming players and those who have no expectations for strategy. Even the $4 price tag isn't enough to make The Last Haven a game worth playing. It would be a good idea to switch to Free-to-Play with cosmetic microtransactions and at least some multiplayer. Then you could create sessions and play with friends, swap resources, send expeditions to help your partner and build empires on the radioactive ashes. Even then, The Last Haven would be a secondary game, but an interesting one nonetheless. Until it is, The Last Haven is an emphatic no.