The fifth installment in The Last Stand series and the first since 2012. This game changes the original formula from the old Adobe Flash tower defense and side-scrolling RPG games to a Roguelike. The game actually has a full-fledged story as this game takes place 15 years after the apocalypse and the collapse of society. You find yourself playing as one of the "volunteers" in this game. These "volunteers" are people who are already afflicted with the zombie virus, but have not yet turned. Their goals is to venture out beyond the walls of the "colony" to find supplies and possibly a solution to the zombie outbreak.

The game features a skill tree system with tons of unique and helpful skills to aid you on your journey out beyond the colony. There is also a crafting system where you can craft helpful consumables and piece together weapons to take out the zombies. It took me roughly 58.5 hours to 100% the game with the two most difficult achievements being reach level 100 and complete 5 full runs. If you die in this game, you take over another one of the volunteers, however you keep the skills that you've unlocked.

I really enjoyed the Roguelike elements to this game and it was actually pretty challenging starting out. Even after beating the game the first time you can make the challenge even tougher through the bounty system. Each successful run took about 2-3.5 hours with varying degrees of difficulties due to Loot RNG and if I wanted to play more up close and personal with the zombies. The mutations system was also pretty neat as there were some really cool abilities you could get at the risk of dying easier.

I recommend this game as it's a pretty fun trek through the Zombie apocalypse where any wrong turn could spell disaster.

This is another one of those games that I liked a lot more than it actually deserves. The core loop, what you spend the majority of your time doing, is addictive and engaging, but a lot of everything else is frustraingly or poorly designed. So it's a good thing that the thing you spend a lot of time doing is fun!

The game itself is a roguelite with some extraction vibes, meaning that you loot everything like crazy but you don't get to keep your found loot between runs and you can only choose to send certain supply drops you find home (or keep them for use in that run). You move along a map in an FTL, or perhaps Flame in the Flood, style map where you can't turn around (because your mission is suicidal and your infected character isn't expected to return), and in each location, you have to find gas for your car as well as food, water, ammo and crafting supplies. You can also find books and manuals and such that constitute "knowledge", which is the currency used to buy meta-progression upgrades, so looting is a very central part of the game and I love this game when I'm running from house to house, clearing out a few zombies and checking every drawer in the house to make sure I didn't miss any batteries or a pack of 9mm bullets.

From there, you plan your route based on your own knowledge, meaning that at first you just pick a route blindly, then you might upgrade to picking a route where you hit as many stops as possible in order to try and maximize your run and in order to find "knowledge" for permanent upgrade, until you finally have gathered enough upgrades and knowledge to breeze through levels and to pick the best route (which, in my opinion, is a route that prioritizes supply drops for good guns and tons of ammo, military bases to find the antiviral injection that slows down your infection and safe houses in that order; everything else is just "if you have to" status). If you run out of gas, you have to play a little bonus level that takes place inbetween locations on the map, which is a linear little combat level with nothing but zombies and a gas tank.

This is the core loop through four different zones - which are the suburbs, the forest, a sinking city and the bombed out hollow and dead wasteland aptly named Hell - and this is what's good about the game and kept me hooked and constantly feeling like I wanted to try the next upgrade and to get further in the world in order to see more areas hold, see what the random generation can do with different areas, what guns there are to unlock and find and so on, and it was ultimately pretty satisfying as your endgame character is leagues stronger than the beginning character. In my first few runs, I ran out of time (meaning the infection took over and I didn't find enough antiviral injections) by the second zone, but in my final few runs, I was so confident in finding my way around the game that I could easily activate the challenge mutator that starts you with 30% infection and I still didn't hit 40% by the time I completed the run, so there's a major difference both in character upgrades and player experience and knowledge as you progress.

It's a very small thing, but I think my favorite detail in this game is starting the car! You've got a crappy old beater that won't start the ignition on your first attempt, it never does, and instead you have to hold a button to try to get the engine to start through multiple ignition attempts. Sometimes, like a real car, it'll almost ignite but then quickly give up and, when that happens, your little ignition meter jumps a little in correspondence with the engine almost starting. It's a tiny thing but very nicely implemented!

Unfortunately, however, it wasn't all fun and games and this is another one of those roguelites where you quickly begin to realize and feel like you're playing a demo for the first 10-15 hours. Adding skill trees to roguelites was a mistake! When they're there, you are just constantly reminded that you're not playing a "real" run, because you don't yet have the melee damage, the raised scavenging find percentage, the decreased rate of infection. This creates an interim time, between the beginning and once you have all the vital upgrades unlocked, that feels useless and like you're playing a demo where you have to painstakingly unlock the whole game, and this game is very guilty as almost all of the meta upgrades are stat upgrades that simply make your character better (as opposed to unlocking a variety of different guns, for example, that just allow different playstyles as opposed to giving a flat stat up). It really doesn't help that this game offers very hollow illusion of choice, in that some of these upgrades are not voluntary. I mean, you can choose to upgrade your unarmed melee damage first, if you like doing things wrong, but the only sensible choice is to begin by picking the one that raises your knowledge found, then the one that raises XP, then the one that puts "survivor radios" in the world because those have very good loot. After you've spent a solid 10 gameplay hours picking out base level unlocks that seem necessary rather than voluntary, you can finally begin to upgrade your character, and after a solid 10 hours of that, you can finally begin to make real runs with the character designed as they're meant to be and with the difficulty mutators active. For me, this is a big letdown that lowers the gameplay experience quite significantly, and as such, I hated the middle portion of this game, after realizing what I was doing and before I had all the important basic upgrades unlocked.

It must also be said that I've seen reports of this game performing poorly on possibly all formats. It definitely stutters pretty badly in zones 2 and 4, but not zones 1 and 3, after you've been playing for a while on PS4. This can be allevaited and sometimes even removed by restarting the game to clear the obvious memory leak, but even then, there might be some pretty bad stuttering and I've absolutely been killed a few times by the game stuttering just as the giant zombie launches his attack. I have a lot of patience and I can overlook technical issues like this if I like the game design, but people who are not should be very wary of this game's performance. There's also kind of a lot of crashing, but fortunately, the game saves before every level, so you never really lose any progress at all. I think only the first zone has randomly generated levels, and it is both impressive in what a believable suburban street it can create, and also unfortunate in how it often fails and places objects outside of the gameplay area and such. When that happened to the only gas tank on the level when I had a completely empty tank, I had to let myself die (as the bonus gas tank level doesn't apply if you try to leave a level with 0, it only kicks in if you have something in the tank but not enough to reach the next level). This explains why the latter zones have prebuilt levels and, as such, are a little boring, but even with the mistakes, I think it was the right choice to make sure that the beginning is varied and isn't the same on every run.

There are other issues that hold this game back, and I was going to write a very negative review listing all of the little annoyances, but the flaws don't feel as important or noteworthy now that I've completed the game and landed on feeling like I did overall enjoy the game quite a bit and got hooked on not only beating it, but beating it a few more times after that for the bonus content that unlocks the first time you win. Anyone who enjoyed How to Survive or Dysmantle should probably play this game. I know I loved both of those and I kind of loved this one too, even though it's got many more flaws than I noted in the above review. This one just does enough right, has enough heart and is good enough that I liked it.