Jaedar made the error of asking for my impressions, and as is my wont, I ended up writing a short novel, so I guess I can post it here as well for anyone who is interested in the game:
The Last Spell is a roguelike, which is a genre I conceptually love but where I've found few actual games I enjoy. The reason I normally don't enjoy these games is that the base mechanics can be superficial or play second fiddle to the progression systems that are at the heart of the genre. The Last Spell is kind of the reverse. The emphasis is put squarely on core gameplay, with a few very tested, very diverse scenarios in a clear story structure with balanced difficulty which each test your capability with the game in different ways with a variety of content.
The main reason The Last Spell is gewd is that it succeeds completely in its core conceit: blow up fuckhueg waves of zombies with a wide variety of tactics - from aoe spells, melee bonks, spreading poisons, in-your-face-coned gunblasts to non-hero stuff like traps and buildings. The combat is really fun and the presentation is GREAT; very satisfying sound and graphics when you beat up shit, slow, loud, pounding heavy metal running to the beat of the combat, simple and effective pixel art with lightning fast animations that can be sped up to insane speeds (though this is one of the few TB games where I rarely speed up combat animations because they're already moving by in a flash).
Forgetting about all the game's systems and its structure and all that, it's just immensely, kinetically satisfying to nuke incrementally bigger waves of enemies with these skills within this presentation.
Basically in each scenario/map, you start with a couple of heroes and a run-down base. Game plays on a day/night cycle. Every day you improve your base, level up your heroes, spend resources and manage defenses and upgrades. Every night a humongous horde of zombies attack (think enemy numbers in the hundreds), and your 3 (early on) to 6 (lategame) heroes have to defend your base in turn-based combat.
The character system is simple but extremely sturdy. Basically, every hero's active skills are defined solely by the weapon they equip, but each hero is unique in three ways:
(1) their three starting perks, which have a massive impact
(2) their skill tree, which consists of three base skill lines (melee, ranged, magic) with randomized perks in each individual tree (for example, the magic tree's initial perk can be two different mana perks) as well as two random archetype trees and 2 additional utility... ish... trees with a bunch of random stuff in them
(3) when heroes level up, you get to choose to level up 6 stats - but these stats are randomized out of a massive pool of attributes, so you don't have full control over build paths, and your heroes will vary depending on what great selections they get offered here. For a basic example, you might not plan to focus on crits, but then on level 3 you get an excellent Crit Chance stat in your pool and you decide "ok imma make a crit build". You can re-roll to get a new selection, but each time you do, the amount of stats on offer is narrowed, so you have to be careful
What this ends up doing is that you can both plan out a wide selection of builds depending on the uniqueness of your toon, but within those builds you make changes and roll with the punches of what you get.
Of course on top of the game has a couple of metaprogression systems as any self-respecting roguelike should, such as unlocking qualitative upgrades like new buildings, weapon sets and so on, adding stats, making certain things easier and so forth, or systems that allow you to scale up the enemies but get certain perks.
The metaprogression is basically as good as in any good roguelike, but the gameplay is much more meaty. It's also wonderfully focused; instead of wasting your time with an infinite procedually generated dungeon, it tasks you with completing unique scenarios with their own designed variables, and the gameplay diversity comes from your upgrade choices as well as all the variables that can change within a given unique scenario.
EDIT: oh, and conservaspergs like BING XI needn't worry, you can fully customize hero looks to banish randomized lesbian pixie haircuts from your game if you so choose
But yeah other than greatsword melee gameplay is a bit too risky. If you want a viable melee in higher difficulties greatsword is the only sensible route.
