The Last Shot review

• Reviews by Drew Onia
• Published:

No misfires in this wonderful dieselpunk side-scroller that both entertains and satirizes modern warfare

Is war a carefully planned series of strategic moves based on sound intelligence? Or is it merely an exercise in brute force? The Last Shot puts players in the middle of battle, sending them through a city seemingly built for the sole purpose of engaging in armed conflict with a far-off foe. It’s not a horror story, however. Rather, it’s a satire closer in tone to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 than Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a thoughtful pantomime that effectively critiques war, showcasing a society’s unchecked and unrelenting embrace of aggression. It’s also a sight to behold from start to finish, telling its story through dense environmental art and clever puzzle design. Even apart from the narrative it’s a standout puzzle-platformer in its own right, though the two are so thoughtfully interwoven that it’s hard to call the game anything but a masterpiece.

The Last Shot begins in bed, with our nameless (and speechless) protagonist being rudely awoken by a loud explosion outside. Well, actually it's the alarm in his home that wakes him up, with the air raid sirens, emergency buzzer and percussive impact doing little to disturb his slumber. Beside the bed are a few taped-up photographs of the protagonist and a woman. His home, while a bit rundown, looks lived-in, with books, exercise equipment, and tools strewn about. Slipping out of bed and unleashing a long yawn, he begins to panic not because his apartment is literally under attack, but because he overslept.

A short tour through the house follows, familiarizing you with the controls and basic gameplay mechanics as our hero gets dressed and ready to hit the road. Though you do not know exactly where you are headed or why, a letter found in the main bedroom offers a hint as to the protagonist’s motivation, unfolding through a series of still panels depicting the woman from the wall photos with a military unit. It is the first of five letters found throughout the game, revealing how things are transpiring for her across faraway enemy lines.

The story is brilliantly told through the game’s layered environmental landscapes, with everyday citizens in the foreground and the city’s (literal) war machine operating in the background firing shots off into the distance – the direction you are headed. During the four-to-five-hour campaign you’ll see the city in its remarkable, absurdly inadequate, dieselpunk totality. There are buildings recently ruined from enemy fire, as well as people going about their usual commutes, treating the war as a normality of daily life. The streets are lined with propaganda posters done in an authentic Soviet Realist style, contrasting amusingly with the cartoonish in-game characters. These posters become more and more degraded (and graffitied) as you approach the frontlines, showing that the regime’s power only holds onto a small part of the urban populace, mostly unaffected by the war.

A news crew (first seen outside your home where the bomb landed) reappears throughout, covering other news stories, though with a heavy police presence you also see how the reports are being spun. Protestors appear at several points, with most only holding boards containing vague symbols meant to skirt the apparent anti-dissident laws, while others break free with posters depicting the regime’s leader, only to be chased down by the authorities. Public transit, security checkpoints, workplace safety checks – none of it works as it should. The elaborate contraptions built just to keep the city moving are as comical as they are ineffective: rail cars come unhinged and send passengers plummeting to their deaths, and extreme measures are taken simply to prepare, load, and fire a single round from one of the city’s gargantuan weapons.

Some of these details are merely background for storytelling flavour, but others are woven thoughtfully into the gameplay. In order to make progress, you’ll have to break the law by stealing equipment, for example. At first it’s not entirely clear where your character stands morally in regards to the war – patriot or saboteur. However, along the way it becomes apparent that whatever his allegiance, he is driven by love, not stately duties. Rules constantly need to be broken in order to advance through the city and complete your work, though ultimately it is all for a greater cause.

The Last Shot is a 2D side-scrolling puzzle-platformer that has players running left to right for nearly the entirety of the game. I played using a console gamepad, but the PC version can be navigated using just the keyboard or a keyboard/mouse combination that works fine but isn’t quite as comfortable. Though you can backtrack slightly in certain scenarios, the way forward is always to the right, and you’ll never need to turn around in order to collect items or clues you may have missed, though you will need to detour vertically fairly often by climbing steps or ladders.

Every obstacle you encounter can be overcome with the tools or equipment in the immediate vicinity. Our protagonist is a jack of all trades mechanic who is capable of fixing just about anything. Armed with a hammer, wrench, and his hands, you will walk, run, jump, and sometimes drive through the urban labyrinth on your way to the frontlines. Moving platforms and conveyor belts make up the majority of the game’s traditional platforming challenges. Failure to reach a safe ledge often results in death (and a restart at a usually close checkpoint), though there is also plenty of low-risk jumping and climbing simply to navigate a series of platforms to reach a new area, with miscalculated leaps resulting only in a short drop.

The Last Shot

Genre:	Science Fiction
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D
Theme:	Conspiracy, Savior, War
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Environmental puzzler, Puzzle-platformer
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Action:	Platforming, Timed events
Difficulty:	Medium
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

Often, however, tests of speed and timing will be chopped up with brain teasers. Switch puzzles, requiring you to raise or lower a platform, are commonplace, as are box puzzles that have you assemble a staircase of sorts or trigger a weighted switch. Then there are more complicated puzzles, like measuring oil levels via containers and a drainage system, turning the power on in a specific sequence, or searching for fuses in dense piles of rubbish and scrap. While a few of the challenges kept me occupied for twenty or so minutes as I struggled to find the pattern needed to progress, no puzzle is so complicated or overwhelming as to stump you forever.

One segment in the munitions factory is a multi-step problem broken into three separate puzzles, and checkpoints are located only at the beginning and end of the sequence. I quit partway through once, after struggling for a while, only to find I had to redo the first sequence all over again. But that is more my fault, as the game does connote when it is saving at a checkpoint, and these checkpoints are (otherwise) doled out quite generously.

Another scenario that takes place in the city’s underground has you piloting a helicopter through caverns, collecting materials needed to open the barrier back to the surface. This sequence can feel overwhelming due to its large, open spaces (compared to the rest of the game’s rather claustrophobic setting) but it isn’t so drastic a change as to make you get lost entirely. In part this is thanks again to the generous checkpoint system, keeping you on track in terms of where to head in the branching pathways.

One puzzle involving a jet-powered mechanical box does appear to put you into a no-win scenario if done improperly. You can simply reload the checkpoint, but this requires exiting out of the game and going back to the main menu. A quick option to restart a puzzle from the pause screen would have been useful in this particular situation.

The Last Shot uses 2D parallax layers to build its environments. Characters are well animated and move smoothly between actions; the only hiccup I ever encountered was getting stuck on architecture, leaving the protagonist in a constant falling animation before eventually wiggling free. The foreground, where all of the action takes place, is nicely constructed through oblique perspectives, clearly communicating walkways through its slightly isometric framing. By default the graphics are depicted with a high-grain filter that makes it somewhat resemble an old film reel, with lots of noise and artifacts dirtying up the “film.” This is entirely optional, however, as you can easily remove it in the settings options for a clean, more traditional hi-res look.

The hand-drawn backgrounds are the real star of the show, showing off the machines endlessly fighting the ongoing war. Though much of the artillery is identifiable, albeit laughably large, other contraptions are simply ludicrous, like Ferris wheels with cannons in place of the passenger cars, rotating and firing off in slow succession. The rain-soaked urban ruins of the final chapter heighten the suspense of the climax, and the aforementioned cavern sequence, though making it a bit hard to tell where it is safe to touch down at first glance, provides an unsettling glimpse into the city’s ancient machines and buried history. Explosion effects look great too, and the addition of water and flame to the artwork is seamless. The vehicle sequences are empowering, serving as a nice reward after hours of squeezing through gargantuan machines like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

The score changes with each new chapter, moving from jaunty comedic brass tunes to more industrial rock as you progress into the manufacturing sector, and it’s good music to play along too, even if it simply loops. Your tools (hammer and wrench) make noises when used, and the sounds of the city, between artillery and other urban activities, add to the game’s general sense of chaos. Shell explosions near your person are conveyed with suitably loud impacts, while actions taking place in the horizon echo forward, nicely tying the scenes together.

The atmosphere is grey and dreary, as befits the devastating reality of battle, but the landscapes are packed with detail. Every part of the environment is so packed with “chicken fat,” it’s often tempting to stop and stare at a highway fender bender, worker androids on the job, a bloody stuffed bunny seemingly listening to the radio, or any number of other fun sight gags and details. Whether observed in segmented chunks or as a whole, The Last Shot’s world is continually fascinating to behold. There’s no cursor or pop-up hotspot indicator, but collectable items are marked with a sparkle effect, making them easy to identify. An icon in the upper left shows which means of interaction you have currently selected (hands, wrench, or hammer, switched between with the press of a button), as well as any items you have on your person (a key or fuse, for example), though the latter are used automatically when needed.

You can press and sometimes hold the relevant keys or buttons to run, jump, and grab hold of or interact with certain objects in the environment. Controls feel tight and responsive, with the protagonist having a predictable weight and arc to his jumps. The camera can be zoomed between two vantage points, the closer one being the way I preferred to play much of the game in order to see more detail and hunt for items, though the zoomed-out view worked better for vehicle sequences. Hints are just a button press away, in the form of a thought bubble that appears over the protagonist’s head, though upon entering a new puzzle area there is a cool-down of around a minute, forcing you to explore first before coming back to ask for a clue if needed. 

Final Verdict

The Last Shot has no alternate endings, but the game is so masterfully orchestrated in its unison of storytelling and puzzle sequences that it is nevertheless highly replayable. It’s like a good book you can read again and again, appreciating the minutiae of its design more with each playthrough. This is a story about an average Joe asked to do the impossible, and rising up to the occasion, but the underlying message manages to resonate through a wholly unrealistic and comedic lens, all without muttering or writing a single word. It’s wickedly funny in how it depicts life in a warzone, pointing out the lunacy of operations without being disrespectful in its delivery. And gameplay is a perfect mix of platforming and puzzles, deserving a place in the pantheon with other greats of the genre. The Last Shot is simply one of the most enjoyable and brilliantly designed games in recent memory that I’ve played, and is so effortlessly effective and entertaining that any type of gamer, hardened adventurer or not, should find joy in its satirical shenanigans.

Drew played The Last Shot on PlayStation 5 using a review code provided by the game's publisher.