The Last Game review
:: GENERIC GOODPrice: $1.99
Version: 0.2.0
App Reviewed on: iPad Pro
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Sometimes a game doesn't have to be super deep to be enjoyable. For $ 2, The Last Game offers up some generic roguelite shooting action all without taking itself seriously or ambitiously, and honestly it is probably better off that way.
Shoot and loot
The Last Game is a dungeon-crawler where you move between arenas killing everything in your path with mostly a projectile weapon of some sort. There's no particular story, and the opening signpost when you begin a run that thanks you for playing the game, apologizes for not really having a story and finishes by saying "let's just say you're here to defeat the big villain, ok?"
Once you have cleared a room, you then get to choose between two different paths that are labeled with the kinds of rewards or advantages they might grant. You may choose a room to earn some coins, or gain some kind of powerup. Some rooms even let you deposit items for use on future runs or ask you to sacrifice some of your health or other items for a chance at a rare perk to help your fighting ability.
Uncover and unlock
It won't take long before you are able to clear The Last Game in full. It's only three different dungeons with bosses at the end, and the game's challenge rises as you go but doesn't feel insurmountable even if you didn't build a particularly impressive loadout for your character. All told, a full clear of the game takes about 30 minutes at most.
Once you beat The Last Game, you then gain access to other character classes to play as and earn a lot of currency that you can spend at checkpoints between dungeons to aid you on subsequent clears. From there, there is still quite a bit to uncover as The Last Game has challenge modes that ask you to beat the game in certain ways or using certain characters that can keep you occupied for a good long time.
Nothing to break, so nothing to fix
There isn't much more to The Last Game than this, but it plays well and gives you a quick burst of roguelite action which--though generic--is still rewarding and fun. Well, actually, the game supposedly has four-player co-op, but it's all local co-op using controllers so I haven't been able to test it.
The nice thing about being so basic and generic by design is that The Last Game sidesteps a lot of potential problems by simply not having those features in the game. That said, I do wish that some of the humor from the in-game signs was sprinkled into the experience, and that there was some more visual variety, particularly around character classes, but having things like that would feel like minor bonuses as opposed to adding missing features.
The bottom line
Sometimes you want to turn your brain off and play a familiar and friendly video game that still has a little bit of depth to it. Despite mobile feeling like the perfect place for this kind of game, they are actually quite hard to come by! The Last Game is very much a game like this, though, and serves up some quality and straightforward roguelite action.