When I first saw videos of The Last Guy, I was confused. Then I saw the “developer interview” on the PSN and got even more confused. When I finally played the demo, I went with a bad taste in my mouth, and to that effect, the demo didn’t blow me away, but I did see potential. When I fired up the full game, I started playing and didn’t put the controller down for four hours.

When you look at the graphics and hear the sound effects, you might not think this is a “next gen” game. The Last Guy has a very simple menu presentation and uses a high contrast color scheme (most often red on black backgrounds). Once in the game, you see Google Maps layouts for 15 different levels (15 cities) with little sprites to represent people, Zombies, and you, The Last Guy. The look is simple, but it immediately gives you a sense of nostalgia for older games. The music is odd, but very addictive. I find myself humming the tune every once in a while. Other background sounds will make you laugh from time to time as people cheer and scream.

The gameplay mechanics are fairly simple in The Last Guy. First off, here’s the back story. Earth has been blasted by a purple ray which turned tons of people into Zombies. You, too, are a zombie, but you love humans, so you join forces with the United Rescue Force (URF) to help save people in some of the world’s largest cities. You navigate the streets, parks, and allies in search of hidden civilians to gather together and lead them back to the Escape Zone, where a URF life boat will come to pick them up. Sounds simple, but a lot of strategy is involved.

You have to learn the patterns of the various Zombies in the game and know how they’ll react to you getting close. As your progress, the Zombies get tougher and more of them show up to try and steal the citizens from you. As your line of people gets longer, your Stamina bar increases, which allows you to perform special moves such as running very fast with your line or crowding everything together for protection. There are also barricades in certain places on each level which require your line to be a certain length to break through. Most of the larger crowds of people are behind these barricades, especially the VIP characters (you get more points for them). The objectives of each stage is to get a certain number of people back to the Escape Zone in a certain period of time.

You wouldn’t think so, but there is a surprising amount of replay value in The Last Guy. You’ll definitely want to go back and try to beat your own score on a lot of the levels. You’ll also need to play the later levels many times to complete it (and you may throw your controller a few times as well). Planning your movements and ways to evade Zombies is critical to your success in The Last Guy and you’ll have a blast doing it. I do have two criticisms with the game though. The first is how how short the game is, since I completed all 15 levels in about 4-5 hours. However, the replay value will extend the life here. The second, and somewhat bigger, is the amount of crashes and glitches you may see. During my play time with the final build of the game, it crashed completely once requiring a restart. Two other times, the graphics dropped out for 3-4 seconds, causing me to die from Zombie attacks. Very frustrating to see this happen. Hopefully it can be fixed with a patch. Otherwise, the game is a ton of fun and worth the $9.99 purchase price.

Overall: 8.5 out of 10

Click here to see what our scores mean