Last Command review

written 2026-01-28

Last Command is an action game with the unique premise of "snake X bullet hell". This sounded really interesting to me, like something I'd design, so I played it in 2026-01. I played on Expert mode, 3rd out of 4 difficulty setting, and took about 25 hours to finish it. My final opinion is that Last Command is fucking awesome and the coolest action game I've played so far. I've never so eagerly bought DLC right after finishing. And then immediately replayed the whole game and the DLC on Nightmare mode.

Core mechanics

There's not as much snake as I hoped, since your tail is pretty short most of the time, you can cross over it, and you also can hold space to be in "observe-analyze" mode, which lets you stop moving and instantly contracts your entire tail.

Still, the tail matters in practice, since you don't want to be constantly entering observe-analyze mode. You move very slowly in that mode, and also you generate energy (resource for special abilities) over time only while moving in snake mode.

To attack, you must pick up pieces of data that spawn randomly. Each one you're carrying increases the length of your tail, and you spend them for damage by going into analyze mode ("observe-analyze" is the same as "analyze", but without attacking). The game gives you a nice tradeoff to deciding how much data you want to build up before you attack, because the longer tail is more dangerous, but you do more damage the more you fire at once.

Another mechanic that affects this dynamic in interesting ways is that enemies slowly heal if you haven't damaged them in a while. If you touch their heart, all previous damage becomes permanent, but sometimes reaching their heart is too dangerous so it can be worth firing shots early to interrupt healing. In other situations, this might just give them more damage they can heal before you can touch their heart.

You get an invulnerable dash, a mechanic I normally don't like because it makes positioning less important, but here it really doesn't. Dense swarms of hazards make this a completely reasonable ability for the game since you have to think about where you're going to land. Its cooldown is also about 3 seconds long, so you want to avoid wasting it. But at the same time you want to avoid keeping it charged for too long, because then you're missing out on the opportunity to cover distance faster which lets you reach data and deal damage faster.

There's also 2 different shades of being hit: if your front 3 dots (your minimum length when moving in snake mode) is hit, you take damage and drop all your data, but if your tail is hit, you don't take damage and drop only some of your data (I think it's based on where your tail is hit). And when dropping data, half of it spawns around you and can be recollected if you're fast. I always like intermediate outcomes like this, although I think the punishment for having your head hit is maybe too severe, considering how low your max hp is (3 hits on Expert and Nightmare mode).

The final core mechanic is "overclocking" which happens when you have 6 data at once (the max you can hold by default), and lets you unload them much faster. And some enemies have shields during some phases that make them invulnerable except to overclocking. I'm not a fan of the shield mechanic because it's too "all or nothing", and is annoying when the damage of a full overclocked burst is barely less than enough to finish the phase, meaning you have to do a second overclocked burst. But even here, the game gives you ways to work around this, like starting your overclocked burst while next to another data and picking it up during the burst lets you fire 7 instead of 6. Certain combinations of equipment (which I'll get to) can increase your carrying capacity, or make 3 data enough to overclock, and there's one equipment that lets you do a small damage amount of damage by dashing directly into an enemy which works even against shields.

As for other mechanics, the game introduces a few different types of colored objects with different behaviors, seemingly taking inspiration from Undertale: blue objects only hurt you while you're moving, orange objects only hurt you while you're in analyze or observe-analyze mode, and purple objects can be destroyed by dashing into them, and doing so refunds the dash charge used. These are combined to add a ton of variety to enemy attack patterns. There are also a few fight-specific mechanics that add some novelty but don't get reused. I think each of these mechanics is excellent. I especially like the orange one because it makes the snake aspect more relevant by punishing observe-analyze.

Enemy design

This game doesn't have much of a concept of "boss" versus "normal enemy". A few fights in the first two chapters are more like warmups or tutorials for specific mechanics, but other than that almost every enemy has 7-9 phases (they're pretty short) with increasingly difficult attack patterns. Often the first couple phases will show off one part of their moveset each, and then later phases will combine them.

Although the phases are short, 7-9 is still a lot for how low your max hp is. So they have a checkpoint system, where enemies have 1-2 checkpoints placed after certain numbers of phases. But you can only retry from a checkpoint 3 times before you have to retry from the start.

At first I was skeptical of the limited retries, and of the whole checkpoint system, but near the end I realized why it's here and agree with it. If you could retry from a checkpoint infinitely, you'd be encouraged to never change your module config after reaching one because you'd have to restart to do that. And compared to a system with no checkpoints, this allows you to practice the late phases without having to play the early ones so many times that they get unpleasant.

Though I still think it's weird and confusing that you spawn at a checkpoint with full health, but the amount of energy you had when you got there. I feel like it should be both or neither that gets refilled.

You also get a small heal after each phase of a battle, and I really like both that it's there and how it's balanced. It being there lets your max hp be low without overall mistake tolerance being too low (if max hp were just higher instead, then restarting from a checkpoint would be too easy), and makes it so I don't feel like giving up if I'm at low hp with a few phases to go. The amount is 20 hp whereas all enemies deal 35 damage by default (on Expert mode, on Normal they deal 25). I like this balance because if the heal were >= the damage of 1 hit, then beating a phase while staying at full health would be no better than beating it while taking 1 hit. But 2 phase heals is more than the damage of 1 hit, so it feels like you can be forgiven for those annoying mistakes on the first, easiest phase of a fight if you earn it.

As for the design quality of enemy attack patterns, they're always excellent. Almost everything is fairly telegraphed, more so than in any other action game I've played, and rather than excessive density or speed, it combines bullets moving in different ways. A lot of patterns have strategic insights you can have that lead to an easier time, but don't trivialize them.

Equipment

You can equip 1 active module (your energy-costing ability) and 3 passive modules at a time. The passive modules come in red, blue, and green types, and you get an additional bonus depending on which combination of colors you equip. I really like this because it adds intersecting considerations to picking modules. For example, sometimes there aren't any red ones I really want, but I really want the bonus I get from having one of each color. Or sometimes I'm more interested in the bonus I would get from having two reds or two greens.

I also think most of the equipment is really well balanced. While struggling with a fight I often changed my build several times, I found success with different builds for each enemy, and by the end I had tried and used to good effect almost every module.

This is also a rare game where the equipment actually gives you quantitative information! The bomb even tells you its damage formula! I love this.

Structure

I'm a bit disappointed at how stiflingly linear the game is. There's literally never anything to do other than the next main story fight. There's never even a place you can practice fighting anything that isn't the next main story fight. The sequence of fights is only broken up by short traversal challenges (I would call them platforming, but it's not a platformer).

About those traversal challenges, while they're not hard, I'm sometimes frustrated because their controls are different from the battle controls for no reason. Observe-analyze mode is a toggle instead of a hold, holding it makes diagonal movement sometimes not work, and dashing always un-toggles it for some reason.

I'm also a bit disappointed by how many times certain enemies get reused. 4 different characters have 2-3 separate fights against them. Their movesets aren't the same between fights, but have enough in common to feel like repeats to me.

Story

The story is hot garbage. I kind of expected this due to its publisher, but it's even worse than that, maybe the worst story I've seen in a video game. Poorly written dialogue, every plot thread dropped, inexplicable major actions, cutscene incompetence, narrows its focus to chasing after a damsel in distress for the entire second half, and tries way too hard to be tragic: literally every ally or likeable character is either killed, given a fate worse than death, or turns evil, and then is killed.

Most fights also have pauses for dialog at the start of each phase. Usually I don't mind this because you can quickly fast forward through them, but some of them, for some reason, have like a 5-second delay before you can fast forward (and also before any text appears), which annoys me. And some of the most epic fights in the game have their last phase or two reduced to a gimmick where you can't fail and it spams dialogue pauses.

It's also got this horrible gimmick at the end, where it pretends like the game is over before the last boss and won't let you continue until you mess with game files and doesn't clearly explain how, and even once you do it, it's locked in a state where you can't access earlier saves or the new game button until you beat the last boss.

Well, it's a good thing story is less important than gameplay to me.