The Last Spell
Defend the last bastion of humanity with your squad of heroes! Exterminate fiendish monsters with magic and brute force by night and re-build your battered city defenses by day in this tactical RPG with rogue-lite mechanics.
The Last Spell is a tactical, singleplayer and 2d game
developed by Ishtar Games
and published by The Arcade Crew, Gamera Games and DANGEN Entertainment.
Released on March 09th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 11 languages: English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, French, Japanese, German, Spanish - Spain, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian and Portuguese - Brazil.
It has received 10,870 reviews of which 9,979 were positive and 891 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.9 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 12.49€ on Steam and has a 50% discount.
The Steam community has classified The Last Spell into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at The Last Spell through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- OS *: Windows 7
- Processor: Intel Core i5-3470 or AMD FX-8370
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650, 2 GB or AMD Radeon HD 7770, 2 GB
- DirectX: Version 9.0
- Storage: 2 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
If there's one thing it excels at, it's making you feel hopeless yet determined - over and over. "Oh man, this is it. There's too many, there is no way I can actually survive this night..." and then "Wait, what? The horde is thinning? Wow, maybe..." and then "Impossible. We actually survived?" and then, the next night "Okay, NOW it's over. There's no way..." and so on. What The Last Spell actually is, though? Final Fantasy Tactics but They Are Billions, semi-roguelike and with a banger of a soundtrack that mixes heavy metal, darksynth and some harpischord. And yes, the music IS important here: the game is difficult and cerebral, you'll spend a lot of time listening to it while carefully planning your next move over the course of the night. All night, every night The idea is simple. Defend your little town for a set amount of nights. You'll always know the general directions where the enemies will be coming from and in approximately what force, so you can place your warriors and defenses where they're needed most... and those are arguably the most difficult decisions in the game. That's because there's never enough. How many heroes to defend this one side? Which side will have to be manned by just one person? How do I allocate the precious few materials I got, do I reinforce the walls' weaker spot or build a balista? You'll have to make some tough choices, and then later adapt your strategy to these choices. But there's another, more important layer of strategy to be found here. I'm holding out for a Hero 'til the morning light Your fighters. More specifically, the way you build and equip them. This isn't the kind of game where higher numbers = automatic victory. This one is a bit of a doozy so let me explain... For one thing, not every perk is available to every single hero, and you will not know which ones exactly will you get until you buy the hero. So builds will always have an element of improvisation to them. Ah, but you need to be very careful with your choices, because if you don't build your hero right, they simply won't pull their weight, and probably just die. And while you can mark which perks you're planning to take (more games should have this feature!), you will never know which level up stat choices you'll get and what sort of gear you'll find. So chances are you'll have to adjust course of action. He's gotta be fresh from the fight Different weapons and builds have different purposes. Some are good at crowd control/AoE. Some are good are good at picking off these swift flanker type enemies. Some are good at dealing with armoured enemies, some are good at assassination (swift elimination of powerful enemies), some are good at debuffs and poison. Even a roamer build is viable, so a character that moves a lot to aid others. But to construct these builds, you have to understand the unique stats this game has. Crit chance and crit power are simple enough, but how exactly does armour work? What is Opportunism? Isolation? Momentum? Multi-hit? Resistance reduction? They're stats that use mechanics not really seen in other games. Opportunism is a damage multiplier against debuffed enemies, benefitting from a debuff-centric style. Isolation is a damage multiplier against enemies that don't have an adjacent ally, which will probably end up being elites and bosses. Momentum is a damage multiplier you get for every tile travelled (unless teleported). Different weapons have additional multipliers for these stats on top of these; daggers and rifles for isolation, certain magic weapons have an opportunism bonus and so on. Make sure you read the skills and damage calculations carefully so you understand. Do it again, do it right But don't worry. The game is hard. The odds seem insurmountable, at first; but every defeat will be a lesson. There unfortunately is one difficulty spike that is a little much - and it's not even at the end of the game... but otherwise, the pace at which the game throws new challenges at you is exciting yet ultimately reasonable. If you fail a mission, the next time you try won't be exactly the same. The initial setup will be the same, yes, but you'll have completely new heroes, the waves will be completely different, the one thing that will remain is that the boss is going to be the same (even if their angle of attack will obviously be different). Oh, and there is meta progression, which also contains some story bits! Some of the writing is pretty atrocious, but otherwise I liked the plot and the slow drip of info of what's really going on. A friend of mine called it nonsensical and a bit of an a** pull, and it kinda is, but eh, I liked it. There's also a pretty clear message, but as we all know, we gamers are awful at media comprehension, so chances are you won't even notice it until someone points it out. Cleanse the blight There's a lot more to say, but I think you're informed enough by now, dear reader. Let me just bring up some statistics. 60% is the magic number; it's the amount of players that progress through each stage. So 60% of all players get the first meta unlock, 60% of these beat the first mission, and so on; that ends up resulting in only 4% of players beating the game. That's pretty low, you might say. Why is that? Well, the game is quite a time investment, it's difficult, and pretty methodical. I think it looks great, but you wouldn't call it flashy. It most definitely isn't a power fantasy, either; you'll feel like it's your last stand for the better part of the game. But to me, the satisfaction of surviving yet another night, of annihilating a group of clawers, of stopping a powerful enemy before they could reach the walls... addicting like a drug. When I first got the game, I played for 34 hours in 2 days. Admittedly, I was feverish and bedridden at the time... but it's still an excellent game. Even as I write this, I'm considering getting the DLC, or replaying it on harder difficulty. And if nothing else, the music REALLY SLAPS. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42922988/]Curator page
Read more
If you like tactical grid-combat games, wave defense, roguelikes and dark fantasy, this is definitely something to pick up, even for the soundtrack alone. This is a positive review, but most of this is going to be about the negatives so you know what you're in for, because some of these will absolutely be a dealbreaker for some people. The game also doesn't really hold your hand. There's a tutorial sequence that helps with the basics, but it's leaving a LOT on the table. Buyer Beware.. [*]Incredibly unforgiving for mis-inputs. I've lost multiple runs because of a misclick in the production phase or accidentally confirming an attack one tile too far over and instant-killing a teammate, or clicking a useless talent right before the boss. You can undo movement which is great, but a lack of a confirmation step for placing buildings or attacks that might hit your teammates is absolutely insane. [*]There are several difficulty spikes that you cannot possibly overcome with just skill. A pretty noticeable one is unlocking the second level, Lakeburg, as the amount and strength of enemies jumps pretty dramatically. You WILL have to go back and grind the first level for the upgrade currency for a dozen hours or more to even have a chance, because it's not really a difficulty spike, its a DPS check. [*]A LOT of useless items and abilities. At least half of the talents in the talent tree are unpickably bad, multiple weapons are actively terrible (the DLC adding the ability to ban item categories from the drop tables helps. Slightly.) Especially early on before you can upgrade your heroes to have less bad perks, some bad perks (I'm looking at you, Nihilist) are so bad that, if one of your starting heroes has it, it's better to immediately forfeit the run and restart, because they will be useless. Similarly, because the skill tree is random for each pawn, you will frequently get pawns with an entire tree of useless skills, or skills that don't match their traits at all. [*]Attacks miss. A lot. This is largely a pet peeve of mine (Why I can't stand XCOM but enjoy Mechanicus, for example), but you will be inundated with attacks randomly missing no matter how much you pump their accuracy stat, especially ranged weapons as the miss chance goes up for every tile of range. [*]Difficulty can be inconsistent. Whether or not you survive a night sometimes comes down to how the waves are laid out or where a certain enemy spawns. This is fairly typical for roguelikes, but its very noticeable here. If you're still willing to give the game a shot with those in mind, there is still a lot to love here, and why I continue to play despite all of that, many of them things that would instantly have me refunding another game. The soundtrack is incredible. If you like dungeon synth and genre-blending it with orchestra and metal into a pretty unique soundscape. The sfx are also fantastic. The weapon sound effects are punchy, you can feel the power of the rifle weapons by their loud crack, or the low boom of a fireball. When you aren't being scammed by miss-chance or getting punished for misclicks, the combat is deceptively deep. If you are an optimizer at heart and you like mechanics with very rigid keywords, stats, and interactions, this game is a playground for that. This allows for some really surprising interplay between abilities (both yours and the enemy), as well as quite a lot of freeform creativity in builds (even if most of them will suck). The customization is also very fun, you can change the name and appearance of your characters pretty thoroughly, and save them as strings of numbers to copy-paste for later or to send to your friends. I really wish you could save the presets within the game, but in the meantime you can just open a notepad file to store codes. The stylization of the game is also very nice. The hud elements do a good job of nailing down this dark fantasy post-apocalypse vibe alongside the spritework and narrative itself.
Read more
Amazing game. Bought it 10 days ago, and already have 36 hours invested. This is a great Tower Defense / Tactics Game / Rogue Lite Each run/scenario I feel like I'm learning new ways to play, and/or I am getting excited about my next run when I try a new set of tactics. Its 4 hours past my normal bed time.. I'm an adult.. I should know that I can go to sleep and play in the morning. But time just slips by with this game
Read more
The game is good but very, very badly needs a "restart day" button there is no worse feeling than getting to like day 11 of your run and messing up ONE thing and losing like 7 hours of progress. The core gameplay is strong but i imagine a lot of people just drop the game after their first big wipe
Read more
The Last Spell is in fact a turn-based Tower Defense game with a lot of extra steps, and every one of those extra steps is awesome. The turrets and the traps and the walls are still there, but they are greatly devalued in favor of a squad of heroes. Instead of building a deadly fortress, your town-building is focused on providing an infrastructure to get more heroes and equip them well. What struck me the most about this game is how well-designed it is. Every system interlocks flawlessly to deliver an experience where every single choice matters in some way. It really is a masterpiece of game design. The difficulty curve is also really well tuned. You can win your first run of every zone, but it'll be hard and you'll feel like you earned it. The permanent progression system makes revisiting base-level runs trivial, but you can increase the difficulty with Apocalypse levels at the start of the run. A "run" will take from 3 to 12 hours depending on the zone, it's not a quick thing to get through. Currently there are 5 zones in total, each with its own gimmick and final boss, and it took me about 80 hours to finish the campaign on the base difficulty. If I were to re-run every zone at all the higher difficulties, it could easily take 500 hours more. The narrative is kinda funky and I feel there wasn't enough explanation provided to fight Final Spoiler Boss, but it's still a fun story. My one and only real gripe is no multiple save files in-game. You have one campaign and that's it. I'm fine with all choices being final and not being able to save scum, but if you want to start from scratch for the fun of it, you have to manage the saves outside the game. Anyway, the game is super good, buy it NAO.
Read more
Similar games
View all
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates
| Steam data | 05 December 2024 00:37 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 23 December 2024 14:55 |
| Steam price | 23 December 2024 20:49 |
| Steam reviews | 23 December 2024 15:52 |
Online players
481
Developer
Ishtar Games
Publisher
The Arcade Crew,
Gamera Games,
DANGEN Entertainment
Release
09 Mar 2023
Platforms