Steve Boxer gets his mitts on The Last Guy for Three Speech…

The Last Guy: Hands On

While excitement builds as a slew of massive releases is readied for the Christmas market, there doesn’t seem to be much hype around for the next crop of games due to be uploaded to the PlayStation Network. So it’s a good job we’re here to let you know what they’re like. The latest PSN game we’ve been playing is The Last Guy, created at Sony’s Japan Studio. It turns out to be deceptively simple, agreeably quirky and thoroughly diverting: just like PSN games should be.

In The Last Guy, it’s up to you to save the world – a post-apocalyptic world, that is, in which giant zombies and monstrous insects roam the cities and surviving humans cower inside their houses and civic buildings (which seem to have survived whatever cataclysmic event took place completely unscathed). There are 14 main levels (plus some bonus ones), each set in part of a real city (among which are London, San Francisco and Washington DC), viewed from directly above as if from a satellite.

At the start of each level, you are given a target number of survivors to rescue and a time-limit. You’re some sort of unexplained mutant with abilities roughly akin to the Pied Piper of Hamelin: the gameplay simply consists of scuttling around the city streets, giving frightened survivors the confidence to emerge from their hiding-places and form an ever-increasing line behind you. You must lead them to a safe zone, avoiding zombies and monsters (which will send your assembled mass scurrying for cover if they get too close, or kill you if you touch them).

Sound simple? It is – The Last Guy positively revels in its simplicity, which is no bad thing in an age when games are becoming increasingly complicated. There are a few other aspects to it: you can change to a “thermographic” view, which lets you see which buildings harbour groups of survivors and gives hints to the whereabouts of secret passages, you can whistle to bring dawdling survivors into line, and you can sprint for a while until your stamina runs out. There are various power-ups dotted around each stage, too, which do things like restore your stamina, render you invisible for a while and teleport you back to the safe zone.

As you may have gathered, The Last Guy’s gameplay doesn’t exactly challenge your brainpower – but it does prove to have much more depth than it initially appears to. Each time you clear a stage (if you meet your target prior to your time elapsing, you can carry on rescuing survivors, amassing extra points), you get less time to clear the next stage, and a bigger rescue target. And the number, diversity and general intelligence of the zombies and giant insects ramps up dramatically with each new stage. Initial stages seem pretty easy, but soon, you find yourself having to develop proper rescue strategies, and scan the thermographic map in search of power-ups.

If you approach The Last Guy expecting it to provide hours of full-on, state-of-the-art gameplay, you’d find it a disappointment. But you could say the same thing about the vast majority of PSN games. What it does provide is shortish doses of fun, old skool arcade-style top-down gaming which will make you chuckle and, when reach its later stages, offer a decent challenge. Perfect fare for having a bit of a breather in between draining sessions of some hardcore game which demands protracted periods of concentration. It is, if you like, the games equivalent of a palate-refreshing sorbet.