This turn-based tactical roguelike makes zombies cool again

After hours of strenuous gameplay, I finally did it – I healed The last spell‘s first city of its violet smog and breathed new life into the remnants of civilization with a semblance of hope.

In developer Ishtar Games’ cursed fantasy world, an Archmage has decided they’ve had enough of the relentless war, so they’ve developed a ritual of mass destruction to finally put an end to it. As a commander, you try to banish magic, because Oppenheimer’s mock spell covered the sky in a poisonous fog and spawned huge hordes of murderous mutants. You lead a lot of brave heroes to their deaths while giving seemingly OK mages enough time to expel the magical seals plaguing the world.

The last spell takes the team-based gameplay of turn-based strategy games à la Fire Emblem and XCOM, and ramps it up to 10 by combining it with the massive hordes It’s billions. Instead of facing an army of equal size, your hapless heroes collide with an onslaught of bloodthirsty adversaries that sometimes number in the hundreds. For the first few nights, my heroes were frail and scrawny, but as the days progressed, they turned into zombie-killing machines that left traces of carnage. With each level up you can upgrade an attribute such as health, armor or damage and give your heroes perks that change their play style.

Against this, many enemies, units or heroes are needed that can control the masses to survive. I’ve had a few runs The last spell where I didn’t have a distinctly bulky body to deal with the constant onslaught, or a crowd control specialist who could massively reduce a cluster’s health. However, with the leveling system, I was able to turn one of my mages into a tank by boosting their health and blocking ability, while also swapping their damage-focused gear with another one that was survivability-focused.

structural, The last spell is split into two phases: daytime and nighttime. During the first, you use your resources to construct buildings, strengthen your defenses, and upgrade your heroes’ equipment to prepare for the ensuing undead army. Your goal at night is to defend the mage in the center of the city by defeating every monstrous crawler, thus surviving until morning and repeating the cycle over and over again. After all the devils have been eliminated and the night is over, you’ll be introduced to the roguelite progression system, where you’ll gain passive abilities, stronger weapons, bigger defenses, and new omens (buffs you can set up before you go to increase the power of your heroes and your refuge).

Image: Ishtar Games/The Arcade Crew via Polygon

Each night, a legion of zombies invade the city in waves from a pre-forewarned direction, giving me time to build up defenses and position my heroes on the correct side of the city. Each hero has a certain number of action points that must be used to reduce the numbers to a manageable level. Spend a few points to drop a meteor on the enemy cluster or smash through the enemy lines. I made sure to use anything and everything to drive the plague out of this town, but I made the foolish mistake of believing that my mana would regenerate as soon as the sun rose. The next night I was caught with my pants down. In a game where the enemy forces are suffocating and overbearing, tanks are vital for mob control, while mages spread damage to the fiends – but with no mana, the angry mob ran over me with little to no resistance.

There are the usual sources of gold, material and workers, but there is also a fourth, and it is the most precious: your time. When a beacon of light breaks through the purple haze surrounding the world, you’re one step closer to scrubbing away the disaster, and a wave of relief sets in. But you soon realize it took five o’clock to finish that run. The last spell requires longer, more dedicated play sessions than the usual roguelite. While that’s not inherently a bad thing – if it was five hours well spent, then it was five hours well spent – but the pace inside these five hours came with their fair share of hiccups.

Essentially, you’re forced to wipe out the first few waves of fodder to face the true champions of the undead army on later nights. At this point, you’ve spent three hours clearing the pawns, only to encounter the queen, rooks, knights, bishops, and even more pawns. Each replay run has you spending hours fighting your way through the early nights in the hopes of finally beating the boss and moving on to the next town. It’s certainly been a blur of incredible medieval metal music and painstaking planning. And it’s hard to complain about a waste of time so satisfying, rewarding and often exhilarating. But with each subsequent retry (despite the roguelike unlocks and progression upgrades), the prospect of such a long journey without progressing to the next port may repel less committed players.

Image: Ishtar Games/The Arcade Crew via Polygon

So I’m thankful that Ishtar Games provided so many options to make The last spell more approachable during a given run. Before you start over, you can set omens to improve your heroes and refuges, but you can also make the game easier by lowering the number of enemies or lowering the cost of items and defenses. Adding these omens made The last spell much less stressful and time consuming, but just as much fun.

Although some runs took up a quarter of my day, I was constantly mesmerized by the stunning music and swept up in the tactical decision-making process. Ishtar Games clearly knows how to induce a state of flow, distort time and strike a balance between challenge and approachability. To play The last spell means settling down for the long haul; but if the long haul is that exciting I will keep returning.

The last spell was released on March 9 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code from The Arcade Crew. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.