The Last Shot Reviews

You'll buy this for the art, which is great, but not for the gameplay, which is not great. The puzzles are nothing special, not bad but neither original nor exciting. The platforming is weaker than average. The level design is fine and offers variations, but lacks checkpoints. The handling of the avatar is the real issue; it's rather lacking, poorly responsive, unpleasant, even after remapping the controller. Unlike other games in the genre, it makes my thumbs sore and forces me to take many breaks. On the fence for the recommendation, I suspect that younger fingers than mine can progress to the end with little trouble, so I'm giving a thumb up with a warning.

If you like quirky art and of a mixture of platforming and puzzles, you can do a lot worse than this.

Not a fan of platformers, however, I really liked the setting and design of the game. It was a breeze. From a technical point of view, platformforming works, is well made, uses time-tested mechanics, and dilutes the game with not particularly complex puzzles. The only problem is that the middle of the game feels stagnant, because many new mechanics are introduced en masse towards the end of the game, I would like them to be stretched out better throughout the game. I really liked the visual design of the game, the interesting, not hackneyed style, the ability to turn off sepia - good attention to detail. The setting of an endless, obscure war adds an interesting dynamic to the phlegmatic, detached face of the main character, who goes towards his goal. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Не любитель платформеров, однако, сеттинг и дизайн игры очень понравился. Прошел на одном дыхании. С технической точки зрения платфирминг работает, сделан добротно, используют проверенные временем механики, разбавляет игру не особо сложными головоломками. Единственная проблема - середина игры чувствуется застояшейся, ибо много новых механик подается скопом ближе к концу игры, хотелось бы получше их растянуть. Очень понравилось визуальное оформление игры, интересный, не заезженный стиль, возможность отключать сепию - хорошее внимание к деталям. Сеттинг бесконечной, малопонятной войны добавляет интересной динамики флегматичному, отрешенному лицу главного героя, который идет к своей цели.

I don't recommend this game for the general audience, but if you are interested in game design / level design / art direction, it is a really interesting game to try to understand why it's not working. Overall: Feels like a game from the 90's. Made me sick after playing for 10 minutes. Also gave me an "outsider’s art" kind of vibes, which I appreciate.

I've been thinking of getting this game for a while. Instantly fell in love with this dieselpunk world. The artstyle and attention to details is top notch! The game features a unique world, where society is like a constantly moving, breathing mechanism. The work of various systems and divisions of society is going on everywhere. The machine of bureaucracy moves because the ruler needs the non-stop operation of factories and guns. I've always loved narrative platformers, and this is one of the best. Here you can actually “live” the game, despite the fact that it is a 2D platformer. You constantly see how the world exists, airplanes fly, robots paint the walls, someone hangs out dirty laundry, and you run to work at the factory past rallies, humming engines and incredible events. I liked the way the classic puzzles were presented. For example, to move parts of towers, you need to control the robot's four arms! The only negative is the way humans were drawn. For example the main character looks in one style, and his girlfriend looks completely different (slightly worse). The game also contains references and propaganda posters from the 50s. But it would be much better if the people on them were drawn in the same style as the main character (the game has Keanu Reeves and he is made realistically, which is out of style). But that's nothing - i enjoyed the game a lot! It's been a long time since I had so much fun in a platformer. These days, too many "platformer" indie games lean towards metroidvanias and obligatory gimmicks and combat.

I would recommend The Last Shot largely if you like the aesthetic, it's definitely the best part of the game. The art, animation, and the story told through the world is all quite charming. You can see in the pictures and videos if it interests you. There's a lot of detail and fun moments strewn throughout. Sound design has a lot of industrial effects with some comedic touches. Also the music is unique and fun, although I did lower the music volume as it can be a bit distracting. Playing as an engineer/mechanic type character was fun and different. You are mostly traveling left to right solving some puzzle or platforming section, or some combination of the two. Lots of moving boxes around to climb over things, or jumping across conveyor belts, or finding items to fix some machine. It's largely clever and thematic, although what a difficult life the main character lives! I enjoyed the feeling of working these seemingly complicated machines and weapons in this world. There are occasionally vehicles you can control which are a nice change of pace. Nothing is too complicated or frustrating, and the game has a built in hint mechanic if you get stuck. Still some parts are challenging, but I managed to beat the game in less than 5 hours and I am not a particularly skillful gamer. Overall an experience worth having if, again, you are drawn to the aesthetic presented in the videos and pictures.

Maybe it's visually cute and reminded me of Pilot Brothers series in some ways, but controls, checkpoints and puzzles are awful up to the point that it's unplayable. Also amount of easter eggs/references here is just strange. Every meter of this game is full of "hey, there your random meme or character from other game!" Yeah, why not to spend a lot of time to make some cringe easter eggs, when you have bad checkpoints and controls?

The Last Shot has style but lacks substance. This game is advertised as a puzzle-platformer, but both aspects become aggravating to deal with by the second chapter. I got through the game in a little over 4½ hours, but a good chunk of it was staying stuck or repeating certain later sections. From the get go, this game has a graphical style with potential. The drawings showing specific events are a bit crude, but the overall style is there. The thing is that there's a lot of visual clutter during gameplay, and that makes interpreting what you're seeing sometimes difficult, including critical items or platforms. The absolute mess of a button layout info dump in the beginning pretty much set the mood immediately. Both puzzle and platforming aspects start easy enough with a bit of jumping here and there, and puzzling is mainly doing object hunts. However, the platforming is very different from other games, as the main character is comparatively slow, can't jump that high, and has a lot of inertia. It takes fairly long for the character to get to their maximum speed, and landings can easily happen in the right spot but then slide off the end of a narrow platform. As the platforming gets tougher, there's a constant feeling that the puzzles were tested with a more nimble character before nerfing the stats. Moving ladders and boxes can sometimes require almost pixel-perfect positioning, and even then the character will just sometimes randomly hit a platform or an object and just stop and fall, or die if hitting a trap. And as for puzzles, early puzzles are just find item X and put it in the correct spot. But later, this game includes probably the three biggest sins of puzzle games: Towers of Hanoi, the Frog Jumping puzzle (where you need to get each frog to the other side from XXX-OOO setting), and the two different sized containers for liquids where you need to target a value (in this case 4 and 7 unit containers and target of 6). I'm not exaggerating when I say [b]NOBODY LIKES THESE.[/b] These are math problems with set algorithms, and either you know them or you don't. If you don't know them, then the "puzzles" become just frustrating trial-and-error. I cannot recommend this game, and I don't really know if this game could be salvaged just by tweaking the mechanics.

I really, really, really wanted to leave a positive review for this game, as I like to support indies (I'm not refunding) and I can tell a lot of effort has gone into production. It's beautiful, and at times really enjoyable, but considering that it's largely a platforming game, the choices that have been made around the controls are extremely questionable. The character is extremely floaty and not fun to maneuver. During some of the moving platform/roller sections, it's incredibly tricky to get enough of a run up in order to get up to speed and clear the gap. The checkpoints are unforgiving, causing you to have to re-do many annoying parts over and over. Everything is grey and brown, making things rather difficult to spot. I appreciate that collectibles tend to have a sparkle or glow to them, but it's still fairly minimal and blends in with the background. Despite the above, I still was going to leave a positive review. That was until I got to the underground helicopter and jetpack section. Picture all of the above with the fiddly, often unresponsive controls and difficulty seeing things, now add doing it all in the dark. If anything the game gets more frustrating the further you go, and not in a good way. I hope some more work is done on the control of the character, as this is my biggest issue with the game.

Was instantly sold on this one when I saw the trailer, whole narrative premise being a one big homage to Cannon Fodder short from the Memories anime anthology. Turns out, the cannon-crazed industrial city is all good this game has too offer. For a game itself, it's an adventure-platformer where some puzzles are resolved trough platforming, others trough picking items and using them, others by interacting with a singular machine. Some are real oddballs in overal game, like navigating a helicopter in narrow caves, with hazards poking out. There's no very defined narrative why but there is a sense of place you're going somewhere, like to or trough your workplace or to safety. But, well, approaching second part or so of game it gets real mean with it's puzzle-platforming. See, when you create a puzzle you are better off letting people focus on the puzzle and figuring out part, but here quite some puzzle platforming section aren't very generous with their checkpoints and you gotta deal with hazards that make set you back a while. Other parts just rely on some opaque nuance that you'll only stumble onto by chance. Worst yet is that the slightly-to-the-side perspective makes platforming feel imprecise, and your character isn't an athlete, he's rather sluggish, meanwhile a lot of sections in second half require great precision, which due to slowness can only be tackled by rote. And apart from gameplay frustration there's also, like... technical simplicity of it? Like in one section there are four puzzles, pretty involved, including a Towers of Hanoi with giant robot, and if you leave the game during the section you'll have to redo all four of these! And there's a hint only for one thing per scene, which means the devs have checkpoints and hints tied solely to puzzles and nothing else which is... come on do you have so little programmer manpower on team? The soundtrack also disappoints because they have like four-five tracks tops and one of them doesn't even loop proper so it gets doubly annoying when stuck on a puzzle or retrying a complex jumping section. There's an odd bit in game where it starts with soundtrack off by default? WHY?! It hurts to write a negative review for something full of drawing of so lovingly drawn over-engineered machinery and massive industrial complexes I am also passionate for but it's not as painful as actually playing the second half of the game. Skip it. Maybe things will change but as-is I would advocate AGAINST it.