GP Studios - The Last Stand 2

I’ve seen a lot of comments saying this is the best flash game ever (possibly even EVAR).

So what’s changed?

Well, you know how you got rescued at the end of the first game? Turns out one of your colleagues was infected and caused your transport to crash. Whoops.

The first thing of note is the world map. You have to get to Union City within the space of a few weeks and if you don’t make it, it’s game over. This means you have to be even more careful with how you spend your time.

You have to get through several towns on your way there, and each one has its own map with several buildings to search through. Instead of looking for weapons or survivors separately, you have to dedicate a certain number of hours to searching houses, stores and other buildings to randomly come across them.

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Larger houses take longer to search. Stands to reason really.

As well as weapons and survivors, this time you’re also looking for supplies. Travelling from town to town takes a few days, you see, so you need food to keep you going.

This adds a new gameplay element. You can’t move on until you’ve found enough supplies, but whenever you move to a new town you will get a new barricade. Do you risk death by spending your time searching out supplies, or do you play it safe by keeping your defences up – taking the risk of running out of time?

You can also choose to stay in a place when you have enough supplies to move on, looting a town for all its worth. This means you can build up enough supplies to bypass some of the later, harder levels.

And it does get tough. I tend to use the aforementioned method to dodge the hard stuff because I’m a wuss.

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Don’t eat me, Mr. Zombie!

So you now know the key difference; instead of just surviving waves of zombies, you’re using strategy to move from town to town. Bear in mind that the strongest weapons are in the later levels.

But wait!

There’s more. You can now equip the survivors with the weapons you find, making them stronger. Hooray!

And now the zombies have weapons. If the armed zombies reach your barricade, they can kill a survivor with a single swipe. Boo!

As before, they come in at different speeds and some are armoured, meaning again that you have to pick priority targets.

Another thing. The chainsaw, a near necessity in the first game, has been nerfed. It often clogs, taking several seconds to get going again. Should have taken more care in wiping the blood off.

There are new weapons to find as well. The bow and arrow is fun, as you can turn your enemies into arrow-covered pincushions.

There are also traps to find, which you can place on the playing field. These can be a bit weak, to be honest. The bear traps are good, as they keep zombies stuck in place, but the mines and gas canisters go off too easily and are easily misused. Still nice to see variety.

In all, the sequel does everything a great sequel should do. It takes the core gameplay and builds an entirely new experience around it, with more variety and more options.

It’s tough, but you’ll keep coming back. The fact there are several different towns to investigate and more than one route means there’s even more replay value.

But best game ever?

It’s certainly atmospheric and incredibly well done. If you love this style of game, this will be your favourite. If you don’t like this type of game, it’s still definitely worth a shot.

And work is currently underway on a third game. This one looks like a major departure. Instead of being a defence/shooter, it appears to be a free-roaming shoot-em-up. Will it have the same magic?

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