As I mentioned in my Marathon review I am not actually a very big PVP person, despite earning a PVP-related title in Destiny 2 and having spent time in games like The Finals, Apex Legends and, of course, Fortnite. But when I was younger and I was a lot more locked into the so-called Valve ecosystem of games, I did play quite a bit of Team Fortress 2. Ever since seeing the Last Flag (Night Street Games, 2026) trailer during last year’s Summer Game Fest ad onslaught, Team Fortress 2 has been the chief reference I’ve used to think about it.
Everything from the alternate 70s game show vibes and setting to the ways the characters interact with the world remind me of Valve’s classic PVP shooter, and I would like to think that isn’t by accident, starting with what you actually do here. Last Flag is, chiefly and specifically, a multiplayer capture the flag game. The various characters’ abilities are designed primarily around defending points—in this case, three radar towers which help narrow down the enemy team’s flag location as well as provide healing and a spawn point. While you should try to look around for your enemy’s flag, your time will primarily be spent at one of the three radar towers, either trying to steal it from the other side or defending it from opponents trying to do the same. Here I was reminded a little bit of Destiny 2‘s “Control” mode in its PVP Crucible, but the radar towers don’t really switch hands enough for it to be a perfect match.
There are two ways to win a match in Last Flag. The first way is the obvious one: capture the enemy’s flag and defend your home base—here called a “pyramid,” on account of it being a pyramid—from anyone trying to reclaim their flag while the timer ticks down. The other way to win is to simply have more points than the other team when the game ends: more kills, more point captures, and so on. Actually, sorry—I said “kills.” That’s a misnomer. In the fiction of this game’s universe, nobody participating in the game show “Last Flag” can actually die. You’re knocked out and sent back to the green room staging area to revive, return to the map and get back into the fight.
The character design and ability distribution feels a little broken to me. They’re all very evidently based on archetypes; you’re gonna see a character whose appearance, ability set and movement look and feel familiar to you, whether they’re from TF2 itself or another hero shooter/battle royale/team deathmatch/sweaty ass PVP game of another caliber. But there are some characters that are much more evidently useful to me than others, like Banshee, a high-precision bow-and-arrow user who can also dash incredibly far incredibly quickly and whose ult is a healing arrow that creates what I am going to describe as a Warlock’s Healing Rift and you can’t stop me. Or then there’s Arsenal, a scientist who can toss out instantly-built turrets and healing stations, teleport both friendly and enemy players at will, and generate tornadoes—all in addition to a goddamn goo gun. Scout’s got a scout rifle but also has a falcon/kestrel/eagle? who can provide air superiority and also Scout can hold onto its drumsticks and get a major movement boost. That feels like animal abuse to me but whatever. The Lumberjack character doesn’t have a gatling gun—that’s the Bounty Hunter’s ult—but he basically looks like Heavy, moves like Heavy, sounds a little like Heavy (he’s from Finland), and tanks it out like Heavy. All of these characters feel very different to play, and I really do mean very different, in the sense that if I was stuck with one of the bigger, slower characters I would have a bad time in a match.
I do like that there is a training mode in Last Flag that allows you to take each character out onto the firing range and explore their abilities, as well as preview how each character feels to control ahead of time. When you’re trying to figure out each character on the fly, whether in a bot match or an actual round, you will invariably find yourself in frustrating and preventable situations, so being able to prepare and understand your top three choices is kind of nice.
There are aspects of Last Flag that I’m less sure I like. I think generally the movement and shooting—that is, the non-ability gameplay—really isn’t very good. It doesn’t feel great, and I’ve done a bit of self-tuning in the options. It is heavily dependent on which character you are able to choose, and there are certain characters that are already gonna be on people’s shortlists. Some characters just do not square up against each other well, too, so on top of the movement and shooting kind of feeling odd, you might just inevitably find yourself up against a character whose abilities you can’t do anything about, and that’s frustrating. It’s also frustrating that there is a revive system that nobody seems to want to use, but that’s maybe just a problem with imperfect player knowledge.
I want to stress, I haven’t really played much more than a few rounds since yesterday. There’s something fun here but it’s buried underneath a layer of cruft that I’m not sure does it any favors. But unlike a lot of other shooters that have come and gone through the years, this one doesn’t feel like a waste of money or a guaranteed sunk cost generator. For a brand new studio’s very first effort it’s a solid game, and it’s a nice little throwback to a time when PVP shooters weren’t quite so complicated. Additionally, it’s nice to see a game with no microtransactions, no battle or season pass, and a “DLC” plan that just involves regular patch updates pairing with the addition of new stuff, all for free/included with the game purchase. I think Last Flag is a game I’ll be happy to keep poking at periodically to see what/how it’s doing.
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