Here we go with another Kickstarter project in the way of Last Year. It seems like these things are a dime a dozen as of late and unless some random person finds it amazing the campaign will most likely fail. Luckily for Last Year it looks like it has a gimmick that is all the rage with a mix of a bit of perceived originality. Screw Evolve's 4 versus 1 platform. Here we are getting 5 versus 1 that all feels like Cabin In The Woods or Friday The Thirteenth.
That's right. Last Year will take five insanely stereotypical characters from a slasher film and pit them against one of five different slashers. Their goal is to escape or kill the maniac while the slasher only has the goal of killing the group as quick as possible. Here's the Kickstarter video for you to see what the developer has planned for this Unreal 4 title in two years.
Last Year — Kickstarter Video
Last Year sounds cool and all but after digging into a bit of the game's mechanics it seems like it will be unbalanced and not be as fun as most would think; even with the Oculus support that is being included. The biggest mechanic I can see breaking things quickly is that of the respawn. The first killed character can come back as a police officer responding to a call. That is if the killer has not cut the phone lines before that. Mix that in with the only one who can fix it being the Nerd it would be dumb for the player who is the killer not to ax the Nerd then cut the phone or vice versa. Pretty much making it impossible every time for any respawns. Then again maybe I am just seeing a way to break the system before Last Year even has a demo available.
I am digging the mechanic that allows the killer to "de-spawn" and change locations in Last Year. This lends itself really well to all of those slasher flicks that have the maniac appear seemingly out of nowhere just because no one has seen them in the last few minutes. That could lead to quite a few crazy and intense gameplay sessions indeed. I only wish we didn't have to wait until Fall of 2016 to get a real look at Last Year if its campaign ends up being successful. Here's hoping.