AT Reviews: The Final Station

Have you ever wanted to see how well you would survive in the wild? How about in an apocalyptic situation, with zombies, and you have to rescue survivors and then decide who gets to eat and who staves because you only have a few supplies from the zombie infested towns you've stopped in. And in addition to all this, what if,  you were a train conductor. Well if you said yes to that then The Final Station is the Apocalyptic train simulator you have been waiting for.

The Story follows Nameless protagonist as he drives his train around to deliver important stuff to important people. All the while the world is getting shelled by an alien force with zombifying gas. To reach his destination, Nameless must go from train checkpoint to train checkpoint getting the access codes to pass each checkpoint to move to the next. (Minor SPOILERS follow) Eventually its discovered that the gas was actually meant to help people. Making them smarter and stronger but it doesn't seem to have had much in the way of testing. So instead it effects the majority of the population in the opposite way, and then some, turning them into black goo monsters. Nameless seems to be one of the few who are immune to the gas and maybe it's helping him on his trip.

Being that at each checkpoint is located right next to the railway it would be logical to think the access codes to progress would be located there, but that would be wrong. It seems that each and ever station manager decided the best time to go for a walk was during the zombie apocalypse which is probably a bad decision but its made all the worse by the fact that they all also decided to print off the code Nameless needs and take it with them on their doomed walk. What all this means is that Nameless must walk though the entire town trying to find the station manager to get the code to leave and oddly enough hes usually either in or right next to an alternate path back to the train station, so I guess that is at least a little convenient. 

Walking though the town also gives Nameless a chance to search for survivors and supplies since hes passing though anyway. After finding the survivors Nameless has to keep them alive till they reach a safe location. Everyone gets hungry and will need food eventually but some survivors are also sick and need to be constantly given medical supplies in addition to food. To make matters worse the train is constantly breaking so Nameless has to run around making sure everyone is comfortable and constantly do a repair minigame. On the bright side, only one thing will break at a given time, though it will break over and over till the next destination. If by some miracle there is some extra time, in the train engine there is a console where medpacks and ammo can be crafted and other train conductors will text Nameless randomly. Also the survivors are constantly saying interesting things, to bad Nameless is always so busy running around the train and can only hear them when hes in the passenger car. 

Assuming a survivor makes it to a safe location they will reward Nameless with money, ammo or other supplies.Its always exciting to get money though, because the money is super special, it can be used to buy super important stuff, like ammo or other supplies. There where also a couple of locations, with somewhat superfluous weapon upgrades like a laser sight which is possibly useful assuming the game isn't being played with a mouse which functions kinda like a laser pointer by itself. 

After completing all of the stops on his route Nameless turns his train toward home and attempts a return trip, at this point everyone in dead so there aren't any survivors to worry about except for a lone gunman who is in a house with pictures of Nameless and several of the other survivors on the walls. Like the other survivors he joins Nameless on the train but then the train breaks down. It was at this point that I'm actually not sure what happens next. I played to the end but it was here that the game writer must have decided a magic mushroom would help his writing skills because the game becomes almost impossible to understand from here to the end.

Though I didn't really think the story was great all along it was at the end I felt this the strongest, Its here that Nameless makes it back to his home town where everyone seems to still be alive a living normal lives but he is finally getting sick from the gas. None of it is really explained but the gunman keeps showing up around town constantly telling you he is going to kill you when you turn. Which kinda spoils any shock when, surprise Nameless turns and dies in the end. Oddly enough its here that we seem to learn that he has a family which I guess we should feel sad for since he just turned into a goo zombie and was shot by a teleporting gunman, But we haven't ever even seen them, for all we know they are already dead and have been for years since we didn't see them at the beginning or the end. There are a few moments when Nameless attempts to call someone on a payphone but again, no one answers. I think The writers intention was to make this shocking but it really fell flat for me. I didn't care about Nameless's family or even him. The whole story felt something like walking though a western downtown amusement park where you know every building is just a trailer with a western facade, but in this case I guess they would be apocalyptic facades. 

The game would have been so much better if the story had felt cohesive at all. I'm not even sure who was sending the gas, was it aliens? Or was it the shady government? Also I would have liked to listen to what the survivors were talking about but since I constantly had to be running around keeping them alive I never had any time to read what they said, and why would it be designed so you can't read whats going on when you have to keep going next door to get food or medpacks for people? 

Though the story was flat as a piece of paper the gameplay did help hold the game up for most of the four hours it required to beat, but even that got overly repetitive given that each of the checkpoints was exactly the same but with a different layout. I began to consider stopping, but I figured I was probably near the end so I pushed through the last hour or so hoping for an interesting conclusion. It didn't have one.