Last Fort (PC) review "Bulet Hell"

Last Fort is one of the most intense side scrolling horizontal shoot 'em ups you will probably never experience. I say never, because this game has been delisted on Steam, so I can't make any comments on its price. It is, however, a good indicator of its quality. Not much is known of the developer - GiBar, or their publisher, Robot, but it appears that some of their games survived the Great Steam Purge of 2019. Last Fort, though, feels like someone's First Attempt. Last Fort was built in Scirra's "Construct 2", which is designed with 2D games in mind.

There's nothing in the game or on the Steam community to provide any help or tell you the controls. The arrow keys or WASD for movement are simple enough, and you will click on enemy ships and forts repeatedly to fire 'bulets' at them. The aim is imprecise and due to the crazy amount of bulets flying around, you'll probably be rapidly clicking and draining your supply of bulets and then dying and starting over. You'll be moving around dodging fire as you try to figure out how to switch your torpedo bulets for rocket bulets (PRO TIP: Press the 1 and 2 keys to switch between weapons, though the numpad doesn't work for some reason - figuring this out took me longer than I care to admit).



As you can see from the screenshots, the art is simplistic and the colouring is quite basic. The music consists of one short looping track which does not fit the theme of the game. I suspect it's one of the free samples that comes with Construct 2. It's a cheery little guitar riff that managed to get stuck in my head. The sound of bulets is likely also a stock sound effect.

Last Fort isn't all that long - there are only five forts and a whole mess of enemy ships. The game is broken up into two parts - the ship section, and storming the individual forts on foot. As you move your ship around shooting enemy ships, you'll also need to take down the defences on each fort which is on the beach behind. The ship combat is crazy - your ship feels like it is made of paper, and your enemies can basically go right through you as clipping is probably a more intermediate lesson in video game design and GiBar isn't up to that chapter yet.



Once you are clear of enemy ships and you've taken down the fort, you can enter it. You take control of a navy man in a white uniform, armed with a shotgun held at the hip, and perhaps four unique frames of walking animation. There's only one kind of bulet to worry about in these sections of the game, so you'll walk around killing identical soldiers (their uniform is a different colour to yours). Everyone is holding their shotguns from the hip, and you can only fire horizontally at that level. There's no enemy AI to speak of, they just walk aimlessly back and forth and might shoot at you if they feel like it. Enemy soldiers usually take five or more bulets to die, and like the ship sections, you'll often run out of bulets. To leave the fort, you need to kill all the enemies, but if you run out of bulets (if you've squandered the few item pickups along the way), you'll need to let the enemy kill you so you respawn at the start and do it better.

Once you clear the fort, it's back to your ship and on to the next. And the game goes on like that for however long it takes for you to clear it, or you give up in frustration. You can get to the end, but there is no victory, no respite for our weary sea captain. Once you enter an enemy fort, any previous fort becomes healed and active again, and every time you return to the sea, the ships respawn, so you just keep going forever, trying to find that elusive Last Fort.

Community review by jerec (January 15, 2020) On very rare occasions, Jerec finds a game that inspires him to write stuff about. The rest of the time he just hangs around being sarcastic.