Lastronaut Review

Refreshingly entirely free (without even any ads in the way), it almost feels churlish to pick on Lastronaut in any way. It’s an endless runner that’s easy to like but could do with a little more depth to encourage you to love it. The kind of depth I’d be willing to pay for.

You play a rather cute little astronaut who also happens to be humanity’s only hope. Humanoid robots now exist and it turns out they were a pretty bad idea. Oops. So, your quest is to shoot them all. A lot.

Controls are easy enough. You run automatically with tapping on the left side of the screen causing you to jump, and tapping on the right causing you to fire. At the start of each session, you’re given a different gun, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. You’ll find yourself preferring one over another, so it’s a shame you can’t pick them yourself. Having said that, it does keep things varied. When you achieve a certain number of kills in a row, or you're killed by an enemy, action switches to slo-mo. It's cool at first but sometimes, you're going to wish you could skip it.

Where Lastronaut falters is with its pacing. It throws you in at the deep end meaning you don’t always get the satisfaction of accruing a decent score early on. Instead, it feels more randomly defined than most. Plus, there’s the issue of replayability. Without an upgrade path to pursue, you’ve seen all the game has to offer within the space of a few minutes. There is some satisfaction from watching your stats increase and show just how poor your accuracy levels have become (if you play anything like I do, at least).

Plus Lastronaut is still fun, but perhaps not the kind of fun to grip you for a particularly long time. Still, find a friend to compete with and you’ll still find yourself keeping an eye on that Game Center leaderboard, keen to do one better than before.