The Last Level

Platformers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but most of them are designed to put your patience to the test. In essence, the most difficult thing about them is to avoid all the traps and all the enemies that try to hinder your progress. Depending on how much experience you’ve got with the genre, this can be a very easy or a very tough job.

The Last Level is a punishing 2D platformer that presents you with an upgraded challenge in the form of a very tricky level. It may not look like it at first, but every leap and every sprint must be calculated if you are to make it over the gaps. It’s also mandatory that you move quickly, because some of the traps are mobile and they wait for no one.

There’s no story to bother you at all, which is great if your only goal is to play something challenging and not worry about anything else. Thus, you start directly in the middle of things, although the gameplay and the controls are simple enough to be understood from the first few seconds. You can jump, sprint, throw knives and use your sword, as well as slide underneath certain obstacles.

Most of your time is spent trying to make a particularly difficult jump, because most jumps require you to land in a tiny safe zone and even make another leap from there onward. It’s not easy, but it gets simpler after you understand how the controls work. You also have to combine sprints with jumps and slides, which is very stressful and annoying.

The most annoying thing of all is the presence of bugs, on the other hand, because they have sometimes ruin the experience and make you very angry. One of the most dubious bugs is the one that gets you completely stuck and unable to do anything after you slide too early under a platform. Hence, you have to restart the game in order to fix this, because there’s no reset function or even a possibility to return to the main menu somehow.

All things considered, The Last Level is a decent game, but it has too many functionality flaws to be fun sometimes. Hence, as long as you are prepared to deal with some issues, this could certainly make you sweat a bit.