The Last Guy (PS3)
The Last Guy might be the best video game at making it feel like it has set its zombie apocalypse in the real world. Not because it attempts to root things in believable science, the game is decidedly unrealistic in that department and chooses to chase fun ideas over realism, but because it literally takes pictures of cities from Google Earth’s satellite images and uses those as the host for its top-down action stages. With Sydney, San Francisco, Tokyo, and London all featuring their real streets and buildings, the level designs end up far more exciting to explore, the game almost feeling like a series of vacations to famous places and landmarks in between all the zombie dodging you need to do to survive.
Set in a not too distant future, a light shines down from space and turns anyone who was outside at the time into zombies eager to kill anyone they can get their hands on. Everyone who was inside is left trapped by the undead creatures roaming the streets, but the United Rescue Force has the means to pick up civilians and fly them to safety. Unfortunately, they can only reach designated Escape Zones, meaning someone needs to go out into the besieged cities to round up everyone they can to get them to these pick up points. That’s where the titular hero comes in, this character not actually the last man on Earth but instead its last hope as he must carefully navigate these cities to grab as many people as he can before escaping.
When you’re dropped into one of the realistically rendered cities, you are given a civilian rescue quota that you must meet before time runs out in order to beat the level and unlock the next one. Civilians are cowering in all sorts of places around the famous real world locations, some staying inside, others cowering in cars, and a few even braving the streets to stand together to spell HELP ME so anyone flying overhead can see them. When our cape-wearing hero approaches a building the people will start to funnel out, and if you touch a citizen, they’ll join a long winding chain behind you that you need to be conscious of as you continue to explore the city. If a zombie manages to touch your train of people, they’ll scatter to the nearby buildings and need to be rescued again, but special VIP citizens who are worth more in the game’s points system and help you unlock secret levels will disappear if a zombie attacks them. The player character, on the other hand, will outright die if they make contact with the monsters roaming the city, so making sure you understand enemy behavior and plan your movement appropriately keeps things tense even though you never directly battle most of the zombie menace.
The player is able to drop off the civilians following them at the Escape Zones, but building up a longer line is key to earning more stamina for your boosts. Your hero character is able to speed up his movement to better slip his way through alleys and city streets, the line of people behind you mimicking this boost as well as they follow your every movement exactly. If you need to make them hustle towards you and condense into a cluster rather than a long line though, you are able to spend some of that boost energy to pull them close. Making your way around town thus involves getting enough stamina boosts from guiding huge amounts of people at once that such a huge following can properly be managed with your simple options. Some stages even outright require you to hit certain benchmarks for your conga line’s length, barriers blocking your path to other areas of the city unless you can safely cart enough civilians over to smash through them.
The zombie types are really what helps this be a game that involves a surprising amount of tense and frantic action in addition to the careful strategy and planning. Almost every stage in the game has some new zombie type to contend with and the way it mixes with any other previously encountered forms makes the maze-like cityscapes much more challenging to maneuver around. The basic zombie patrols around and only charges if it spots you or your conga line of followers, but later zombie types can include variations like chameleon zombies who will disappear briefly so you need to remember where they were as you navigate about. Large bug zombies run loops around the level and can bowl through your group with ease if you didn’t see them coming, scorpion zombies will pounce and kill your character instantly so navigating around them is almost like a stealth mission, and one level has an unseen enormous zombie who makes your follower run off if they hear its incredible scream. As you can see what constitutes a zombie is rather stretched here and gets even weirder as ones based on buffalos, worms, and even mold spores join the action, but the constant introduction of new threats makes getting around each level safely a new kind of puzzle. Some stages like the one where you need to use a giant worm to break otherwise indestructible barriers can be a little slow due to the issues that worm has in cleanly smashing through the barriers, but for the most part the excellent enemy variety means the game never feels repetitive as you keep needing to accommodate new variables in your level navigation.
Luckily, you aren’t just trying to outrun all these zombie types, the player able to find pick-ups around the stages to turn the tides or completely change how you would otherwise navigate the level. Such power-ups include energy pick-ups that will refill your stamina so you can boost more allowing for speedier navigation so long as you can pick these up often enough, invisibility which tricks foes who hunt based on sight into ignoring you and your people, and you can even stop every zombie from moving temporarily if you pick up the green power-up. Perhaps one of the most important pick-ups of all though is the Return power-up, this letting the player instantly teleport to an Escape Zone with all of their followers for a quick drop off. In the larger, more dangerous, or twisted levels proper use of Returns is key to hitting the required amount of evacuees. This can be a little odd though since the game does seem to have a bit of randomization to exactly where certain power-ups might appear, making some level runs automatically better if a Return is placed in a key location. Using the right power-up to sneak in and grab a huge amount of people or effectively escape a dire situation can be incredibly thrilling though, and planning your route to hit these is key to the best possible run you can execute within the time limit.
As you might have guessed, the city layouts are incredibly important to how everything unfolds, and despite being based on real locations right down to building placement, the way the game cordons off its level spaces help them feel unique mechanically as they are able to emphasize different strategies. Ostermalm in Stockholm, Sweden is a particularly memorable level that is one long corridor of city streets you need to travel down and then safely make your way back up, the people in many buildings not coming out to be rescued so you instead need to use the special ability to encircle a building with a large enough line to bring everyone inside out in an instant. Chinatown in Yokohama, Japan has a huge baseball diamond as its Escape Zone, but it’s crammed in the corner of a city packed with small buildings you need to visit so you need to make sure you have the time to come back to it. In an almost inverted concept, the Sydney Opera House level has the high value location of the Opera House to grab plenty of people from as well as a corner of the city with a bunch of smaller groups to grab, the player needing to grab both even though the two valuable locations are divided by a big park with almost no one to rescue. The distribution of people, power-ups, and zombies helps even some of the levels without big obvious landmarks to have their own feel to them and many of them are challenging enough that you’ll need to play them a few times to learn their ins and outs to actually save enough people to succeed.
There is a bit of a quirk to using Google Earth’s satellite imagery though. The incredibly detailed backgrounds means it can be easy to lose track of the rather small people you need to run to, certain zombies can blend in as well, and perhaps the most consistent problem in the game is actually knowing which areas you can navigate through properly. An aerial view of a town doesn’t account for overhangs blocking views, buildings you can enter, or other visual obstructions that would block the view of the player from above. There are even times there are very thin barriers blocking your path or areas between buildings that are so small they’re hard to make out but can be vital to getting around the town. The game does patch over this problem by giving your hero a special power in the form of Thermal View that turns the buildings into simpler blacked out shapes so long as you hold down X. Alleys become easier to spot, overhangs disappear, and you even get the extra bit of information that is any humans hiding inside buildings or waiting out in the street will turn into easily spotted green dots. To prevent abuse of this power the game turns zombies invisible while it’s on, but even a quick flicker of it will do much to let you navigate the levels more fluidly even if general visual clarity would have probably been the preferred solution.
THE VERDICT: The Last Guy took a risk in designing its stages around the real life layouts of famous cities, but despite the focus on city streets and adhering closely to the satellite images of such locations, The Last Guy is able to make incredibly varied levels to match its rescue mission premise. Containing the action in specific locations of these cities allows them to create more unique stage layouts, and while there are a few issues with visual clarity in the game, you still have the abilities and power-ups needed to make things fair yet challenging. With the constant introduction of new zombie types to change up how you plan your approach and manage the chain of evacuees that follow you, the game is able to get a surprising amount of depth out of its premise by never settling for repetition.
And so, I give The Last Guy for PlayStation 3…
A GOOD rating. The Last Guy does a lot of strange little things that all mix together surprisingly well. The satellite imagery doesn’t feel like it limits the game’s creativity at all as the designers were able to close off sections of the cities to make more interesting maps out of real locations, the zombies don’t try to be close to realistic undead humans so they can pursue all sorts of interesting attack strategies you need to plan around, and even the game’s music decides to go for a single catchy level theme but a lot of remixed public domain music for moments like the victory screen. There’s definitely a lot going on in The Last Guy, especially in the later stages where a bunch of zombie types intermingle and your power-up usage becomes more vital than ever to get around them, but everything sticks to a simple design that is enhanced not by changing how individual things work but by having them work in tandem to increase the challenge of a particular level. The satellite imagery did lead to the game’s one obvious issue in not doing its best to make all of its paths easy to identify, but Thermal View is a fine band-aid for that flaw and it even has the useful side effect of letting you identify which buildings contain people in real time rather than just relying on the map. Perhaps the best part of The Last Guy is how much it values strategy without feeling like it will overwhelm you with all the considerations you need to make, the player needing to pick routes to do well in a level but still having the wiggle room where you can succeed with less planning so long as you know how to react properly or adjust when you find something useful or deadly.
The Last Guy’s gimmick of making levels out of actual city streets thankfully wasn’t a shallow one, the game able to deliver on the impressive sights you want to see from such a premise while making smart use of the surrounding streets and infrastructure to make complex but accessible challenges. Melding together strategy, action, and puzzle solving, The Last Guy pursues its unusual ideas through various unique avenues and ends up surprisingly thrilling for it.