Last Command Review

Last Command is a game by Crespirit and No Game Stuck Studio where you play as a program travelling around a computer getting into shmup battles with various opponents for the purpose of some mysterious goal. As of the time of writing I just finished the game and haven’t really touched the bonus content that came with my pro bono Ukranian copy.

Shmups are kind of a genre you can come into expecting what to get. You play as an airplane or flying superhero and weave around glowing spheres while trying to shoot down everything that’s making those glowing spheres. Last Command is a bit like that, but you’re also playing Snake while doing it and you’re in the middle of a giant adventure game that actually has a story to it.

The game’s split between combat and overworld bits. I’ll go over the combat first since that’s the meat and potatoes of the game. Also I didn’t take any screenshots so I’m just gonna nab ones from the Steam store page.

First thing I thought of when playing this game is that it’s a lot like Undertale. That sounds like something a games journalist would say so let me explain.

The combat segments all take place on black and white arenas from a colorful overworld, many of the attacks are physical representations of the enemy, color coded elements decide how the player can interact with something (for example, stay still to avoid blue attacks), and both are semi-RPG shmups with fairly forgiving mechanics.

Last Command, to me, is Undertale with most of the fluff cut out. Undertale was largely bogged down by its RPG parody meaning that most fights were underwhelming unless you took the genocide route, and its turn based combat mechanics were effectively pointless because you’re put on rails the entire game.

Last Command strips those pointless elements and puts all of its effort into the shmup segments, giving you all the good stuff without making you feel bad. It also involves modules that allow the player to actually define their own playstyle and act as a reward for dedicated explorers.

All of the fights aside from the ones with the doors are teeming with personality. Pretty much every fight in the game is a representation of the character you’re fighting, meaning you can form a connection with even minor characters while still getting the business of the gameplay done.

This game seems to pride itself on difficulty, so how difficult was it for me? Well, I did play on Standard and overall the game was fairly easy. It’s forgiving by its nature, being segmented by fights which you can often save inbetween and also having a retry mechanic where you can start a fight at its checkpoints instead.

I breezed through most fights first try, some others took two or three without checkpoints, and I think I used checkpoints on the final boss because his last phase was giving me a headache.

Then again, this was on Standard. There’s like two difficulties higher than this. Maybe I’ll give it a go on a higher difficulty later on.

The fights themselves very much fall under ‘bullet hell’ type shmups, with all of the misdirection expected of such present. It’s extra interesting with the skeuomorphic design of the attacks themselves, so a bunch of shit can be going on in the background trying to distract you.

Between all of this, you have to go around collecting data that you can use to attack. Collecting more data increases the size of your snake, but also lets you enter a fast mode which lets you shoot very quick and has its own benefits. If you get attacked, you lose health, and if your tail gets attacked you lose data.

I barely changed out my modules at all. I had one that made my charge charge faster, one that let me vacuum up data from afar and made extra data when I collected some, and one that let me attack harder when I was in fast mode. The rest just didn’t seem as useful. This setup can let you blitzkrieg with the right manuevers.

So you’re constantly surfing around the board trying to grab as much data as you can while simeltaneously avoiding a variety of attacks. Keep in mind that much like snake you’re always moving forward unless you choose to go into focus mode which lets you slow down and shrink your tail.

This is fairly unique, it requires a good understanding of bullet patterns to make sure you’re not getting dominated on the board. I had a lot of fun with it.

Now explaining the overworld mechanics will make more sense because it essentially controls the same way minus the modules. Last Command tries to pace itself between bossfights with these sort of easier areas that both ramp up to the next fight and cool down from the last one.

These are nice areas precisely because you control the exact same way on them as you do in battles. This is as opposed to say, a top down JRPG where field controls are much different from battle controls.

You’ll be able to get a better handle on the snake’s controls in these areas, as well as come up with small strategies unconsciously that may help you in the next battles. The overworld also serves as a tutorial for new mechanics on several occasions.

The problem with these areas is the aforementioned pacing, it’s way too heavy on the breaks. If you’re getting through the fights pretty easy, then you might end up spending 2x as much time on the breaks then the actual fights because the game will want you to go back and forth quite a lot.

You fight, then you get more story and cutscenes, fight, more story and cutscenes, fight… This isn’t a bad idea in theory but the way it’s handled in practice can become obnoxious fast.

Really there should’ve been an opportunity to cut to the point more often. I disliked the back and forth and some of the more drawn out overworld sections.

Oh yeah speaking of which, I’m gonna actually talk about the narrative here.

So, Last Command has a story. It’s a very boring one. The worldbuilding is neat, I liked a lot of the dialogue from the side characters and I liked how the world was generally set up and how the mystery was explored, but the payoff really wasn’t there. Let me just spoil the whole thing so I can explain.

So you’re brought to Project Eternity via some random dialogue box, and when you arrive you meet an incredibly suspicious “Support Unit” who is supposed to help you.

Afterwards, you meet your future wife Fei. Some things happen to her psuedo-family and she needs your help to fix them. It’s important to note here that every ‘program’ (i.e. all the people) have a last command. This is the one thing they’re supposed to do, and do well. Things that can’t do their last command tend to get pretty desperate and start to break down. Fei doesn’t know what her last command is, neither do you.

With that you fight a lot of different people who all seem to go batshit insane brawling you. Sometimes you’re even forced into it via weird glitches. All of this time, your support unit refuses to reveal itself to Fei or anyone else you meet, and also pretty much everyone you meet is also someone you’re eventually going to kill.

Fei accidentally crashes protecting you, so you take her away to a shaman who just kidnaps her.

This works its way up to the highest power in the land, the Calculation Princess (i dunno what she’s called in english) who you beat the shit out of.

Surprise! Your incredibly suspicious support unit was actually an asshole the whole time. It breaks the 4th wall, saying it got you here via putting the game on Steam so you’d buy it, which is strange because I never purchased the game. It thanks you for letting it take over the entire world, then crashes your game and ‘bans’ you from Project Eternity.

Here you have to do the Hacknet thing where you modify a text file that lets you play the game proper again, and also fetch Fei out of your recycling bin. I kinda thought this was funny but I was also playing on a couch at the time so I had to get up and go back to my computer which was a little annoying.

Anyways the Caluclation Princess tells you the whole deal about Fei basically being the one thing that’s designed to counter your asshole support unit. You put her back together, then the support unit sees this and tries to beat the shit out of you. You win– oh no wait no you didn’t he has a 2nd phase and just crashed the princess.

Anyways the asshole support unit’s last command was that he needed to become the strongest program ever because the guy who designed him got depressed that he wasn’t making anything good and Project Eternity was looming so he wasn’t going to be able to design anything ever again. That’s why he used you to take over literally everything. Oh and he fucked with your vision to make you attack people for the sole purpose of stealing their power so he could use it to take over everything, so that’s why everyone other than Fei’s psuedo-family was going insane.

If you’re wondering what this is, think of it like bitcoins where owning 51% of them lets you control bitcoins as a whole. They actually mention this at the start.

Fei wakes up, and says he’s misinterpeting his last command as ’taking over the world’ when it really should be ‘be a strong program!’ Then you get a generic ass shounen ending where you defeat him with the power of compliments. This was after what was effectively an obnoxiously lengthy cutscene.

I’m skipping over a lot of the world building but that’s the gist of it. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be left with here. In the end the player was an idiot and none of it really seemed to matter. The dumb shounen ending really fell flat.

It’s a shame, I really did like the worldbuilding and characters but you don’t get much of a taste of them in comparison. Instead you get this weird narrative that doesn’t leave you with much of a satisfying conclusion or a lasting message.

Overall I liked it. Pretty fun game, pretty lame narrative, pretty neat worldbuilding aside from that, I just wish it had more importance on the overall narrative.

The real issues are mostly in the pacing. The game needs a little less downtime because otherwise you’re often left twiddling your thumbs waiting for the narrative to progress.