The Last Federation – Review (PC)

The Last Federation – Review (PC)

The Last Federation is a sci-fi strategy game set in a solar system where you are the last of a race of four-headed water-dwelling beasties, your job is to bring peace to the eight other races in order to prevent mass extinction. 

hydral

(You get to be this bad-ass creature right here!)

Currently this game is in Early Access on Steam. The developer Arcen Games have been constantly patching the balance of the title, so each time I play it feels a little different. I’m looking forward to seeing what the finished product brings.

Your ship is armed with different weapon types, shields, blasters, viruses and your radar. You must fly around either starting wars, or delivering technology, or destroying pirate bases, or whatever other mission your new ‘friends’ want you to do. You essentially become the all-round handyman, trying to please everyone and doing whatever they want to get where you need to go. After you’ve amassed a bit of Credit (in-game currency) and made a few allies, the fun can begin and you can start building a federation that unites everyone.

This is all incredibly complex and there is a LOT of reading that needs to be done. The pale-green-on-black words pop up every three minutes telling you that there’s a new game feature unlocked and everything progressively gets more confusing for the first few hours of gameplay. The display shows all of the ships within the battlefield, including your own, from a top-down view – a little like a more  up-to-date version of asteroids. You have sidebars providing critical information to your vehicle’s vital statistics and your overall performance. These data menus go in to such detail that you can even manipulate whether ship’s power is sent to weapons, shields or thrusters.

battle

(Enough neon for you yet?)

Controlling your ship is simple enough,  fill up your engines to move fast and far, as well as turn in corkscrews and loop-de-loops. Movement involves clicking and following your ship around with WASD. Hold shift to add a way-point to your travel arch. At each click you’re faced with new options – use a special ability, which weapon you want to use, whether you’re auto-firing or targeting a structure or enemy ships. Some battles you find yourself ridiculously OP’d, so you crank up the fire-power and clear the field. In others you’ll be flanked on all sides by enemy drones which you need to out-run if your hull is going to stand a chance.

planets

Aside from the actual flying-around-shooting-things bit, there’s a complex political structure going on here. Each of the eight races has a different agenda, and which one you go to first will affect how the others treat you. Share scientific secrets by running the tech to a drop-point, and chances are someone will start hating you for it. Ignore a planet’s rising crime rate and then swoop in to save the day killing criminals, and all of a sudden that planet will adore you. There is a Race Relations map which offers an attractive, easy-to-use diagram of how everyone’s getting on. Hover over each race to see their enemies, allies and neutrals, then you can click on them to see exactly why they feel that way about that particular race. This is incredibly helpful, for example if one race has stolen technology or lost some to war, you can choose your actions accordingly to even out their opinions of each other. As you make more friends, you will receive boosters – ‘friend of my friend’ bonuses as well as ‘enemy of my enemy’ alliances.

The Andor race was especially helpful on my quest for the federation – they helped me to create trade routes between planets and offer more friendly options. The general tactic I went for was to get all my races space-faring (which affected my relationships in a variety of different ways to start with) and then began to set up trades. I did at one point make the mistake of eradicating a lot of Pirates from the solar system – which in turn made a few of the races quite aggressive towards me (notably the Burlust warlords… Sheesh!) and as I carried on playing I found it very satisfying to slowly improve my relationships with those who had previously shot on sight at my ship. It did, however, at some points feel more like a dating simulator than a political Sci-fi game.

politics

There are all sorts of charts and reminders and actions that everyone is taking all at once, but I struggled to find any kind of meaning in what I was doing. Once you’ve worked out how to befriend a planet, you move on to the next one, and pretty soon everything blurs together much like the neon bullets do during battle. The music got very boring very quickly, however, and although I’ve been playing this game for weeks now, I still don’t really understand what I’m doing. It’s a damn good attempt at creating a turn-based ship-faring strategy game, but at the moment it’s all just too confusing for my noobish RPG-loving brain. I just couldn’t get fully involved in the storyline – sure, i’m the last of a really cool race, but what’s the point of creating a federation if my race is already screwed? I might have four heads but I doubt i’m capable of asexual reproduction. I think it still needs a bit of work, but honestly I did end up playing for a long time and it doesn’t lose its replay value due to its strategic nature. Each decision you make creates a different scenario which keeps things interesting and not at all monotonous.

Pros:

  • Political strategy offers new scenarios and keeps the game from getting dull
  • Oodles of options for customisation
  • Information coming at you from all angles so you really do feel involved with the decisions you’re making
  • You get to be a four-headed beasty
  • Excellent replay value

Cons:

  • Some colours are very similar and I found my eyes getting tired too fast with all the contrast (makes me sound like a right old lady…)
  • Takes a while to get through all the tutorials and even then the content is a bit overwhelming
  • I personally wasn’t convinced by the storyline (what’s the point of doing this if my race is screwed anyway?)

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
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