This post doesn’t currently have a review for it. Instead, we’ve made a podcast episode for it, and below, is the transcript.
Last Frontier (Demo) Podcast Transcript
Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming. My name’s Kay and in this episode we’ll be doing a gameplay review of the demo version of Last Frontier.
At the moment, I’m searching through games labeled psychological horror for the month of October, since it’s the scary season, however I hate being scared and psychological is more my style because delving into the mind’s of people experiencing things that people typically don’t or shouldn’t experience is rather interesting.
Keep in mind that since this is a demo, a lot can be improved upon before the full release and things may change. Things hopefully will change, because as far as demos go, this is about as bare-bones as you can get.
Trigger warning: I talk about death by suicide in this review.
The description for Last Frontier states:
As a result of genetic experiments conducted by one side of the conflict, mutants have overrun the combat zones. You will play as a team of medics dispatched on a secret mission to cleanse the area after a fierce battle.
The team’s main objective is to create an antidote capable of destroying the mutant that is wreaking havoc on the battlefield. To do this, players must burn mutated rats and other monsters in a bonfire to extract the necessary antidote concentrate using a special device. Coordinated teamwork and tactical interaction are the keys to victory in this dark and intense adventure.
Before we get into the actual gameplay review, I want to say that I had a really difficult time trying to locate the demo for Last Frontier.
Like, I searched through demos on the Steam page and this one said it had one, but when I went to the Steam page there was no button for the demo’s download. It only requested I wishlist the game for when the day it fully releases.
I thought this might be a problem on Steam’s side, like with my account specifically, so I googled why I can’t download demos of games and there was a variety of things that didn’t help me out.
Finally, I typed in the game’s name and tagged ‘demo’ on the end of it and went to the SteamDB website where there’s a button to install the game.
I clicked install, and the download went to my library just like that.
No idea why it’s not on the Steam page, since it’s listed for having a demo, but there you have it. If you’re having problems with not finding a game’s demo, just head over to SteamDB, I guess.
Now for the actual gameplay review for the demo version of Last Frontier.
First, let me say that this is going to be a co-op game and not technically a singleplayer one. I don’t know if you’ll be able to do singleplayer, but as far as the demo goes, yeah you can…though nothing really comes out of it.
Secondly, the settings offer you quite a lot in terms of what your computer might or might not be capable of handling and I didn’t go through any of that during this recording. I’m not sure if any of that would’ve really mattered once you see what the demo offers at this moment in time.
Things can always change.
When I entered the game, I was placed on a loading screen that provided basically two tips. The first one in small print at the top left stated:
Use voice chat: Communication with your team is vital for survival and successful mission completion.
The larger hint on the left side stated this:
Work together: Teamwork is essential for successfully facing enemies and accomplishing objectives.
I don’t know if they meant to have two hints at the same time on the screen, but I guess it limits the number of hints you’ll have to wait and sift through on a loading screen.
As for the loading screen itself, I uh, think they made the background image a little too large, because I have no idea what it says. The font is so large that all I can catch is “AS” on top and “ONT!” on the bottom.
If you understand what that means, then good on you.
I’d say the bottom part is important since it’s in red and might be hazardous to our health if we don’t follow the instructions.
After the loading screen, we’re taken into a small cutscene that states basically what’s going on.
They’re close now… The darkness has swallowed the trenches, and we have only moments left before the inevitable fight. We are the last line of defense, and the outcome depends on us. Mutants lurk in every shadow, their roar shattering the silence. Now is not the time to hesitate–we must act. Burn them without mercy until none are left. Every moment counts. We cannot afford to fail. This is our final stand.
No, I didn’t cut off the last portion of the sentence, the game did.
What’s interesting with the cutscene is that there are no monsters that we can see, even though they’re an incoming threat. There are no people going through the trenches and getting into position, even though that will be what we’re doing and our platoon, I guess, if that’s the right word for it.
Don’t berate me, guys, I’m not a military expert over here, okay? We’re dealing with mutants so proper titles are kind of out the window here as we fight for survival.
Just because my dad watches the history channel all of the time, doesn’t mean anything sticks in my head.
On top of not having any military men or monsters in the scene, the camera is just taking us along the top section of all the routes you’ll be able to traverse through in-game. So…we’re not going through the routes themselves, we’re lingering at the top where the barbed wire is and a storm in the distance is going on, since there’s no rainfall.
For such a dire situation…it’s really anti-climactic.
I mean, the camera is going straight through the barbed wire as if it’s not an obstacle instead of ducking and weaving through things as if they have some kind of solidity and aren’t an illusion.
When we get into the game, there are inputs in the lower left that you can check out to see which keybind does what. If only they were right.
I mean, most of them are probably only going to be put to good use when the game’s multiplayer is set into place and the game’s actually playable as a whole, but for now…they’re there so you know what to expect maybe?
We have the following:
- Left mouse in order to attack player, with “apply damage to other player” in parentheses
Does this mean we can attack one of our own as well as another player, or is it clarifying by attacking player, we’re attacking the opposing player? Then again, that doesn’t make any sense, because we’re up against mutants, which I assume won’t be played by opposing players? So would you be attacking enemies and not other players?
First game mechanic and I’m already confused by it.
- F applies random damage
How is that any different from attacking a player with left mouse? What do you mean random damage? Also, in the demo, if you press F, which I assumed would maybe be a fist-swing if anything, it turns a flashlight on.
So if I turn the flashlight on and aim it at a mutant, does that cause them random damage? Is that what it’s saying?
The game so far doesn’t exactly have a lot of dark places that a flashlight would have a lot of use for, so I really don’t know why it’s implemented, unless they don’t like light, which is why it’s night out during the battle that’s about to commence.
- X to knockout self
Is this one of those things where you don’t want to die a drawn-out painful death so you kill yourself in a quick fashion? Like in some situations of a post-apocalyptic world the gun you’re carrying isn’t for the thing that might attack you, it’s for yourself in case the thing is about to attack you?
I don’t see why on earth you would want to knock yourself out otherwise. Unless maybe the mutants will walk past you while you’re comatose.
- E is to be held to revive a player
At least that one I understand. It makes me wonder if after a certain amount of time the dead player respawns at their base or if they just stay dead until the round is won or until someone revives them.
See, this is the bad part of this demo since a lot of these keybinds revolve around someone else being in the game with you. You’re not really sure how the overall game is going to play out until it’s released in more detailed mechanics.
- R is to revive self when knocked out
In which case…why bother trying to revive someone if you can just do it yourself? Unless you can only revive someone else if they die by mutant and not if they made themselves unconscious?
Again, not much sense is being made from it and we have too few details on the matter to even make guess-work worth doing.
- H is for toggling the knockout system
I didn’t press this keybind during the recording, I don’t think, so I have no idea what it means. I think I figured since the other keybinds didn’t do jack, this one wouldn’t either, so I just tried playing the demo for whatever it had to offer.
Turns out, it doesn’t offer all the much.
Once you’re able to move, you’re within a bunker.
Before I talk about the bunker, there were moments where I was standing still and my character would be jittering from side to side. I thought that maybe there might be explosions causing the ground to sway, but no.
Your character just…jitters from something. Maybe I was standing on something and didn’t know it and the game didn’t like it? I’ve no idea.
But it was a little annoying when it was happening, since I’m not huge on head-bobbing games and this felt a little like that in that moment.
This bunker as far as I can tell has nothing for you to interact with, which aside from possible armor or weapons to pick up, I wouldn’t think it would, being a co-op game. You normally have everything already on hand and this doesn’t seem like a game where you would be switching out one weapon for another or one piece of gear for another during a respawn session, if that even occurs.
At this point though, you don’t have any weapons. No guns, no grenades, no pointy weapons, nada.
But you do have goals in the top right, the main one being “burned rats 0/10,” as well as a health bar at the bottom of the screen.
I did end up finding the rats in the game. They are kind of roaming about the corridors of the trenches, but I couldn’t do anything, because it’s at this point I realized the F keybind would turn on the flashlight and, well, turns out a flashlight doesn’t do much to rats.
And besides, the top right says to burn them.
I was a little confused at this point so I went back to the bunker to see if maybe there was a weapon I missed, but…there wasn’t. I’m literally going out onto the field first thing with no weapons while mutants are about to bear down on us.
When I went back through the trenches, there was a dead body that didn’t come with a weapon on them, and I did come across a mutant, but it didn’t seem to see me so I backtracked and went another way.
This time I saw a sign that said Armoury and an arrow pointing in the direction, so at least now I figured I’d be able to get a weapon in order to dispatch the mutant that was hanging around something that looked important.
As I was trying to follow the signs for the Armoury, I came across a dead end and no more signs pointing to the Armoury, which means the Armoury doesn’t exist.
I don’t understand why you would put several signs in the game pointing in its direction when it’s not there in the first place. Unless it’s only going to be there in the full release of the game, which still doesn’t seem fair for a demo of a game that’s about war.
At this point, I’ve got no weapons, no way to burn the rats, and a rogue mutant with no ways to defend myself from it.
Eventually I got to where the mutant was and learned I could crouch, but the mutant was gone.
The important things I noted were boxes of boards where you could pick up a board and place three of them into a bonfire bin, but beyond that I didn’t know what to do. Looking back on the recording there is another small green-lit thing which I assume would be the flame, but since it’s so small I didn’t notice it.
Not only that, but you need to look at the crates bin in a specific way in order to interact with them, and the fact that you can keep taking the wood and keep trying to put them in the bonfire bin became a bit of an annoyance to me, so that helped me in overlooking the flame, I’m sure, since it can be easily hidden by other objects in your line of sight.
Plus I had the mutant to worry about as well, if it came back.
In my time of looking for anything else of use, I realized that the battleground has made bits of the world disappear.
Yes, if you walk around the trenches, there are areas where the world drops off into the void but in the distance you can see other parts of the map. I didn’t test if I’d be able to fall off, because I really didn’t care to find out if invisible walls existed or not.
I could jump over a gap in the world to another section of the trenches, so there’s that.
And it turns out, I didn’t need to worry about the mutant coming back for me, because I guess after walking through that area, they hit a point where they stop walking and just stand still. It won’t hurt you, you can’t hurt it. You can just…get a good look at the creepy thing that has two faces to it and one hungry looking mouth.
That’s basically it, you guys.
I mean, the only thing I didn’t do during this recording is light the bonfire, and maybe after doing that you can burn the rats. Possibly burn the mutant, I don’t know, this is all guesswork right now, but…yeah.
It’s more of a walking simulator of a demo, since you can’t really do much but look at the environment and the one mutant that’s so lonely it’s hugging itself…even though it is wearing a straight jacket.
I don’t know how I feel about the demo, honestly.
There’s just…nothing to do.
No sense of urgency, no feel of an impending war, aside from the fact that we’re in the trenches of a war zone and have barracks. It needs more, but I can see why it’s hard to bring more into it when it also requires assistance from teammates and the demo is treating it as a singleplayer game.
And that’s the end of our gameplay review of the demo for Last Frontier.
We’re the last person on a dead battleground, and they’re the last mutant with no reason to retaliate.
Sorry I couldn’t have put a better light on it, but it’s bare-bones, and when you have nothing more to do in a game, you might get in trouble when you say, Not Now Mom, I’m Gaming.
