Last Kids on Earth and the Staff of Doom

[code]No spoilers in this review! Played on a Steamdeck [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/45534557/]@MatureContent[/url][/code] I quite liked this game. It is a zombie survival franchise for kids, but where the gameplay can still be fun for adults. This is built on the classic zombie apocalypse formula where you have this safe zone with other survivors, shops and a personal space and you then have to defend it and go on rescue and scavenger missions. Defending your safe zone involves playing a tower defense game and saving survivors and completing other objectives like it involves running around the map reaching your target and just killing zombies. In the safe zone you can craft blueprints which unlock new turrets to use in the tower defense segments and new weapons and armor for when you are running around. There is also quite a few boss battles which are pretty cool and I can imagine them being fun to do co-op. There are four characters to choose from, Jack, June, Quint and Dirk. They are like the different classes in the game and therefore have different abilities and playstyles. I chose June for my run. She has high damage but lower health, though it didnt really…

I like the graphics and it's fun to play, but there are too many issues to be able to recommend this. There is 1 type of quest in the entire game - go here, kill zombies, return to NPC. It's like they designed the levels and then had no idea what to put in them. There's an occasional race or collectible, but that's about it. There's a tower defence mechanic that's used maybe 3-4 times in the entire game. You can upgrade your turrets which makes me think they were planning on adding more levels, but you can get through the story easily without any upgrades. Similarly, you can upgrade the car but there's absolutely no reason to. It doesn't seem to have any effect. The melee characters are overpowered, whereas the ranged characters feel useless. They attack too slowly and have really limited range. You unlock weapons/armor throughout the game but the starting gear is the best until you get the legendary gear on the last level. There's no real reason to level up any gear besides the starting stuff. They have different effects/resistances but the game is easy enough where they're not needed. There's little to no story, and they hype up the main villain and you don't even fight he…

My 8 year old & I were enjoying this on our Steam Machine until about 20 minutes in. When we were supposed to attach our first turret to the tree fort, the dialog stopped responding. After quitting the game and restarting, we were stuck in a dialog where our only option was "obj null". I tried new saves 2 more times with the same result. This is unplayable on the Steam Machine.

fun

I picked this game up for my children (6 & 8 as of the time of writing this review) while we were on vacation. They had recently discovered the book series, then the TV show, and then their mother found this game. They asked, and I received it on sale for ~$7. The boys said that the game was a little buggy, but they really enjoyed it. An example bug was that sometimes they couldn't get the vehicle, Big Mamma, to appear, but they could sometimes summon it when they went to a different station. They said sometimes the characters would "drift" randomly (it was fixed by pressing the Y button), but it wasn't a big deal. Overall, they really enjoyed it and completed the main story in about 8 hours. There are additional side quests, bosses, and things, so they are still wanting to play even though they beat the game. Here's their highlights: They loved the new armor skins for the characters They loved the new weapon skins for them as well They liked that there was character/equipment progression The boss battles were a mixture of easy to learn the game and multiple tries to defeat Here are their lowlights: They were sad that they couldn't ride Rover as well as summon him for battle (…

Basically a flash game. Very basic game loop, running around the same maps all the time, enemies are also not very different from each other. My 9yo is a fan of the books and got bored of the primitive mechanics after a couple hours. The story is very basic and isn't fun to follow even for the younger fans of the books. Technically it's not that bugged, but the game wouldn't save upgrades for any characters beside one so also not ideal. Wouldn't recommend for anyone really, even for family coop sessions