PLEASE BRING BACK THE LAST STAND DEAD ZONE I MISS THAT GAME SO MUCH

Quick Tip. if your looking to buy this game, don't expect a Last stand 1 or 2, or even a Union City. This game is probably most similar to a mix of FTL and Hades in its game play loop. Its definitely fun, but its not just more of the same.

The loop goes like this

1)Start with basic set-up, and maybe get a few extras for your run.
2) go from spot to spot collecting loot for this run and your next one.
3) Try to make it as far as you can, often with a complete run taking from 1-2 hours.
4) die, and make your survivors better, and give them better loot to find.

The meta-progression does work really well, with your first few runs making you treat your bullets like their more precious than your health-pool, and even now 10 hours in, I've started getting access to assault rifles and LMGs. Often you'll be given a choice of making your current run last longer with more ammo or med-kits, or sending it back to help unlock new guns when you inevitably die.

While there is a stealth system, don't expect to ever use it. You have a built in timer on you in your infection. outside of a few fairly rare items, your gonna be outrunning your infection more often than you will zombies.

Most of the Negative comments seem to have issues with bugs or issues, but I've yet to encounter any.

Overall, if your interested in the that game play loop I mentioned, I'd say its worthwhile for you to buy and see if you enjoy.

It's a pretty nice blast from the past, still feels like a Last Stand title with quite a bit of polish, and it looks pretty nice. I'd recommend playing with a controller but KB/M still feels ok. Its a fun little roguelite with some scavenging, though the difficulty is not to be understated; there will be fights you will not be able to win without planning, and some fights, if started, can not be won at all. You start with a pistol, don't think youre going to be plowing through those 30 zombies running at you. Overall, my little hoarder brain is enjoying the game.

I was very surprised to find out that this is actually a full fledged game with unlimited replayability. This is not just a tribute to the flash era, they took the loose lore surrounding the last stand series and they fleshed it out. For a top down shooter/beat em' up everything feels good. The melee feels meaty, the shooting feels pin point accurate, and the gameplay loop is very satisfying. Every character you play as feels unique and I find myself creating dialog and backstory for them as I play. As for some of the negative reviews discussing the difficulty and lack of resources, this game is hard, you will not survive every run even in the late game. Some runs you will end up in the final area with 1,000 rounds of 7.62, a drum mag, and an armor piercing assault rifle. Other runs you will die to infection in the first area, its just how the game goes. As for some of the reviews talking about game breaking bugs. I have played 40 hours and only ever been stuck because of a bug one time. very rarely some of the loot drops can spawn in places that are outside of the map. I had 0 fuel and the only gas can that spawned in my area was outside the map so I had to watch my character die slowly to infection. It was frustrating but in the end I just started a new run; its that easy. Plus 99 percent of the few bugs I have seen are due to the unity engine and not the development team. All in all if you are someone who likes good well balanced rogue likes then this is the game for you. I have put many hours into the binding of isaac, enter the gungeon, nuclear throne, etc. and this game holds up to those standards. If I had to compare this game to some of those mentioned I would say that it is a mix between the gunplay of nuclear throne with the dark grittyness of the binding of issac and the good looking 3D graphics of the unity engine. I have had a blast with this game and its a refreshing change of pace in the indie market.
P.S. They missed a huge opportunity by not opening this game up to the steam workshop. The main game would be comparable to a small dlc compared to the amount of content generated by the community.

Please add Last Stand: Dead Zone to Steam.

I can't recommend the game in its current state. I was a huge fan of Con Artist's flash game library. They were the only Flash Dev I really ever cared about. Seeing them get a chance to make a more full-fledged game, well, I was excited!

And then I played Aftermath...

Updates are sparse. As of writing, it's been over four months since any sort of update. Not even any hotfixes for one of the game's numerous bugs. Birds fly through solid objects at ground level. Enemies clip through objects, have mediocre pathfinding, and some subtypes are unbalanced and potential run enders. Character classes mean nothing.

Most devastatingly, the touted "infection meter" is hardly a double-edged sword; it's a full nuisance. The mutations gained from continued infection aren't terribly useful (i.e. they don't help you to survive, don't exactly pertain to builds or class structure, and are in such a small pool that you'll quickly find the one good one and the medicore other 10). All infection does is wind up lowering your health constantly without giving the player any additional benefits as the run progresses. You'll quickly be at a point where one hit will kill you.

The weapons are carried over from the previous games and work well enough. Melee is a little floaty, and the charged attack doesn't seem to do much more damage than a normal attack. The dodge roll is ok. There's also a "focus" mode while shooting to make shots more powerful, but I personally hardly ever use it. It doesn't really fit in with the game in my opinion.

The worst offender of all the issues I have with this game? It's...not terribly fun. Usually in roguelikes, the game finds ways to hook you in, to make you want to keep playing to unlock weapons, maps, characters, whatever. Since all unlocks are bought with supply points earned from doing runs, along with an extremely vague leveling up system that doesn't appear to be explained in-game anywhere (you can't view milestones or things to unlock when hitting a certain level from what I can tell), don't make for good hooks. It's all so nebulous and the upgrades/unlocks so piecemeal and unrefined. There's no stats or anything, no damage markers to tell me if I'm actually doing more damage or not, nothing.

I dunno man. I wanted to like this game a lot more than I did. I'm a big rougelike-lite fan, but this just ain't doing it for me.

EDIT 12/29: lol they only updated the game once last month since my review was posted. They added some maps and three craftable weapons. Nothing about bug fixes, no official patch notes anywhere I can find. What a bummer. I wholly do not reccomend buying this busted, buggy experience.

Remember these rules

1. Always save your batteries
2. Always put a silencer on your gun
3. Always pick up everything that is not nailed to the ground
4. Always avoid environmental hazards as they spell death (especially the fires spawned too far under the ground to see)
5. Always choose the path with the most supply drops, shops and HERC labs.
6. Always run when there is an invisible enemy hitting you.
7. Always buy all the damage upgrades before moving onto upgrades that help with speed.
8. Always hide behind the ALMIGHTY SANDBAGSSSSS!!!
9. Always use ballistics on the last level or suffer the pain of losing both legs to explosives.
10. Always use a molotov before engaging the brutes.
11. Always dodge the opposite direction of a crawler, he will end up in front of you to spam melee to stun lock and kill.
12. Always take the path zombies have already run through and retrace your steps back to the car to prevent traps.
13. Always take your booster shot so this virus blows over after 2 weeks.

Follow these rules and you can beat the game on hardcore (After beating the game you gain access to game edits that increase difficulty stronger/faster enemies, scavenge scarcity and begin the game with half health gone.) I consider maxing all values out to be hardcore mode.

I love zombies, I love Roguelites. And actually, I like this game a lot too. I also like a lot of things like the antiviral etc that has been criticized here and makes the atmosphere for me. I love the sound, the presentation and all the little details that were paid attention to. I dont care about the difficulty, the lack of some ressources (batteries,antiviral) or logical plotholes. These are all fine for me


But .... This game should never have been released like this.The state before patch 1.0 was catastrophic. It was not even possible to shoot over sandbags. Someone should have noticed that. After that it got only minimally better. Even with 1.01 its not really enjoyable

The inventory system is a joke, attachments for weapons have dozens of bugs. Weight doesn't matter, because it's almost impossible to have a good game experience with the default weight. Three weapons, ammo, some health and crafting? Nope, you're full. Alright, I ignore that, have quasi infinite inventory space and use flat 20% (?) more stamina. Good deal. How could anyone look at that and think "that's a good idea?".

Exactly the same way the merchant can be 'abused'. Minimally, he pays 1 Knowledge for each item. No matter what it is. Yay, I shoot my inventory full of 20 empty plastic bottles, sell him that and then buy 150 rounds for the M4A1 from it. Great deal. No idea why it is not out of business yet.

Different loadouts are irrelevant. Survivors differ by the 3 starting items. No perks, stats. Nothing. Unlocking is pure waste. Here you can unlock a loadout for 200 Supply with a half broken revolver. Or you can just buy a working revolver for 500 supply for every char that comes after. Nothing significant.


But the most frustrating thing is getting stuck. And that happens a lot. Way too often. Area completed, good loot found. Maybe you even had 2-3 tanks, which you defeated cleverly and are happy? Great, memorable moments. But then you try to squeeze through between two car wrecks and get stuck.Alt+F4 and you get to do the area again. And then when you die ... it's an incredibly frustrating feeling. As if you had already won, only for the game to say "♥♥♥♥ you" and let you go again. Once is okay, twice is critical. But after the third time (and each run lasts 45-90 minutes) it just annoyed me and I uninstalled the game.

I originally set a thumbs down for this review, because of a blocker in the Sunken City (check out the spoiler bit)

The devs followed-up on this review directly, which is rare, especially for smaller studios. They claim the bug is now fixed and while I haven't checked that out myself, I did look at the forums and indeed people confirmed it. As promised changing this review to positive; the game is interesting and the Roguelike elements are well thought-out, I might get back into it soon!


Don't buy the game, you may end up not able to finish it because the more you progress in the game the more bugs you'll encounter.

Been stuck towards the end of the game because of a silly bug that's been known for over half a year. Leaving this negative review until it is patched.

The Last Stand: Aftermath is a survival rogue-lite action game with strategy elements.

The story is pretty thin. There are zombies and the world isn't like it was before. You're playing as someone infected. Your goal is to explore the outside world and secure as many resources as possible since you will die anyway. There are a few little notes in the world that will give you some hints, background pieces of information, or useful tips and some missions will also give you some of that in dialogues but that's it really. Anyways, you will get a few resources like a weapon and a gun and your adventure begins. You will die eventually but don't worry: This is a rogue-lite. You will come back as a newly infected citizen.

That's the rogue-lite element of the game. You will either die by being eaten alive or get a zombie yourself over time… well, there are some others ways too, like getting shot. Anyways, whenever you die, you will start over with a new character. While exploring the outside world, you will collect resources like supplies and knowledge. With supplies, you can buy additional starting resources (weapons, ammunition, guns, med-kits). Some of them will be refilled each time you restart, others will be gone after using them one time.
With the knowledge you can upgrade your survivors like +10% endurance, 10% faster reload times, 10% slower infection rate, finding more ammunition in the outside world, finding more knowledge, and much more. There is a lot to upgrade.

Whenever you're outside, you will need to explore different buildings, structures, and whatnot. You will encounter a lot of zombies. You can either fight them with guns, melee weapons, grenades, Molotow cocktails or try to be stealthy which takes patience and a lot of time. I found the game to be very forgiving and there are a lot of resources so you don't need to worry about having too few to kill every zombie.

Even though the steam store page doesn't say this is a strategy game, I found it to be very tactical. First of all, you have a car with which you will need to drive to different places to actually progress. You will need fuel, a lot of it. You can find canisters in houses, etc., and need to fill the tank. If you don't have enough fuel, you will stop in the middle of somewhere and need to search for it again. This is a very small thing it seems, but very important to plan your route (you have a map on which you will see different places, how dangerous they are, what to find there, etc.). Planning your route can be very important because some places will have a lot of resources (hiding places for example) and (almost) no zombies.
And secondly, how you approach missions and places. Will you choose to be loud or quiet? Will you throw bottles, to lure zombies to another place and get into a house or just outright kill them? Will you use your melee weapon, which will break eventually, or use guns and use up valuable ammunition? Before I said there are enough resources to kill everyone - yes, that's true. But there isn't enough ammunition to just kill everyone with guns, nor are there enough melee weapons (Apart from them not being viable in every situation anyway). You need to plan ahead to have the right weapons at the right time.

• It mixes action-adventure and strategy perfectly IMO. There is enough of both to make it a fun and addictive experience.
  
• The difficulty isn't decided by resources. A big plus for me is that the game offers a lot of resources but is still difficult. Other games force you into being stealthy to succeed to make it harder, the Last Stand: Aftermath accomplished this without forcing you into it. All in all, it's not too easy and not too hard. Feels like the balance is in a sweet spot.
  
• Meta-Progression is slow but steady and offers a lot of variety to make it engaging.
  
• Dozens of possibilities when it comes to crafting, weapons, and how to approach situations.
  
• The atmosphere is great. I love the sound and looks of the game. The graphics are nice enough and fit the theme very well.
  
• In some reviews, I read that melee weapons aren't viable. This is not the case. Yeah, in some situations they aren't but it SHOULDN'T be possible to fight a horde of 10+ zombies with a melee weapon, especially something like a knife.

• The performance. It's quite bad even though the recommended specs are pretty high for a game like this.
  
• There could be more variety in enemies (though there are different enemies!).
  
• I would like to meet more people who give me missions, tasks, tips, or even attack me. This would add a lot to the game.
  
• More and different structures/houses/buildings.

The Last Stand: Aftermath is a fun and addictive survival rogue-lite action-adventure and strategy game. Even though it doesn't get advertised as one, you will need a tactic to survive. It mixed both genres pretty well. Similar games make the game harder by lessening resources and forcing you to play stealthy - TLS:A makes the game pretty hard without forcing you into any playstyle. I love that. Different situations need different strategies and sometimes you will need to use a gun, or melee weapon, be loud or stealthy, use a grenade or just run away. All of this is what makes this game great. The performance is a bit bad, there could be more different enemies and people to interact with but aside from that, the game is great.

I definitely recommend getting The Last Stand: Aftermath if you were interested enough to read all of this!