A really bad MR game that can’t decide what it wants to be.

It’s a player versus player (PvP) deathmatch. It’s a zombie wave shooter. No, it’s a game that does too many things poorly.

Released Nov. 14 for the Quest headsets, Last Stand by Soul Assembly (Drop Dead: The Cabin, Warhammer 40,000: Battle Sister) is a mixed reality (MR) shooter, made up of a lot of different elements.

The problem is those elements are all essentially half-assed and held together by duct tape.

Last Stand is billed as the world’s first multi-location PvP shooter. In it, you take on a real life player who is somewhere else in the world with their virtual reality (VR) headset, and fight to be the last one standing.

In this MR game your home space is turned into a boarded up storefront in a shopping mall, with the freedom to move around and even use your existing furniture as cover from gunfire. The premise here is simple: you seem to be part of some government style group that is tasked with surviving what one can assume is the end of the world. Your space becomes that storefront, complete with a hatch for your handlers to drop you supplies, as well as a keypad they don’t explain and something to lower the store shutters.

As the shutters go up, your battle begins. Your opponent is a “raider,” some degenerate scum that’s trying to rip off and scavenge whatever they need to meet their own ends. Your job is simple, take them out with violence.

Oh, and because running around your home dodging enemy fire is apparently too easy, Soul Assembly decided to drop in zombies for you to fend off, while you try and survive against another person. While the zombies and their deaths do help you – when you kill a bunch your handlers will drop ammo through the hatch – their presence can be seen as nothing more than filler to a game that already doesn’t have a lot of good going on.

Fighting your way through a PvP match can be fun for about one round, but after that there isn’t really a draw that makes this game exciting. The lobbies seem pretty dead, and finding a random person to play can be a tedious process. Even if you do find someone, you have to hope they aren’t loading their space with furniture to hide behind – or the kind of player who rage quits like a little bitch. Either way, it’s just over a month into the game’s lifespan and there is already a shortage of people who want to play.

Your best bet here is to have a friend who also owns the game and wants to play with you – but even then, how long can the game be fun when you’re just playing the same person over and over again?

It must have been obvious to someone at Soul Assembly that the game would need more, because there are other game modes available besides sitting in a lobby waiting to be matched with another VR player. The problem? None of those modes currently include PvP against a computer. In fact, unless you want to sit and wait – and pray – for a random player to grace you with their gunfire, the only way you’ll really get to do anything with this game is against zombies.

So if anyone is counting, this is now three VR games – out of a very small total – from this developer that features zombies. And they’re all varying degrees of bad.

For those who have not played their other most recent zombie title, Drop Dead: The Cabin, well it’s another wave shooter game. This one you have to fend off wave after wave, while trying to do tasks which are not explained. This game also has a MR mode where the zombies break in via predetermined “portals” on the walls – just like some of the other early and uninspired MR games that rip off this idea from the free game built into the Quest headset.

No part of that game is good, and it’s as if they never learned from their mistakes when putting out this PvP hot mess.

Now in all fairness – sorta – there looks to be an incoming mode that seems campaign-adjacent in nature, but since it hasn’t been fully announced, the only thing we can assume is that there may be a mode where you can enjoy shootouts against the computer.

Let’s talk about the intricacies of the game.

The graphics are varying degrees of okay, with the setting not being entirely ugly. But if you’re talking about the graphical quality of the enemy you may get to play against in PvP mode, then that takes a serious turn towards the ugly side as anything in the distance takes a serious hit. The zombies look pretty goofy here, and one might say they actually look a little better in The Cabin, but overall their graphical design could be improved. They do definitely look better compared to when the game first launched, however, as they and most of the game world was atrociously bad on launch day.

Speaking of things being ugly and broken, when you play this game you’re expected to create a new game-specific avatar – and sign up your email to be registered on their system. Being forever on the mailing list of Soul Assembly aside, creating an avatar – rather than using the one people create for their Quest account – is a tedious and annoying thing.

Changing your player’s skin colour almost looks like it doesn’t make a difference, the hair styles from which you can choose are completely disorganized and seem to be missing pretty standards ones – but there’s plenty of different options if you feel like your character should have dreadlocks and other stupid hairstyles – and there are limited options for clothing without the ability to change the colour of your shirt.

It’s not surprising that even the simplest of things to do once you boot up this game, needs vast improvements to become viable. Nearly every aspect of this game follows suit.

Finally, the most annoying thing about this game – besides being able to find a multiplayer match about 25 per cent of the time – are the abhorrently bad controls.

The controls have been a problem and jank-filled mess since launch, there’s no other way to describe it. Patches over the last few weeks have improved things slightly, with actions like being able to pull the tablet out improving – it doesn’t get stuck, fly away, or not work at all. However, things like picking up items off the ground, aiming properly with weapons, and even throwing items seems broken in a game that doesn’t deserve a good lifespan.

Oh, by the way, your character is not given a weapons holster located on your hip. Nope, it looks as if there are only two weapons slots and they’re both located over your shoulders. There are very few games that have ever made the mistake of forcing a VR player to store a pistol over their shoulder, but anytime this is the style choice implemented, you should expect a very shitty gaming experience.

Overall Last Stand is probably one of the worst games released onto the Quest headsets recently – and that’s saying something considering how many bad games come to this headset. There are so many things to hate, and far too few things that are done right. This game should not have been released into early access, and should have waited until next year when Soul Assembly managed to have a viable product.

If you’re a fan of zombies, or have a bunch of friends with Quest headsets, you might actually enjoy this game. For those who are tired of wave shooters, the overused brain-hungry monsters, or simply think that too many dumpster fires are released for VR, then you’re best off saving your $9.

That’s right, the game costs less than $10 on a regular day – currently it’s on sale for $7 – and it’s still not worth the cost.

The one good takeaway from this game is that if such a garbage developer managed to create a semi-functional PvP game that uses multilocation, then there’s every chance that a creator of excellent VR titles can take this premise and create gold.

Last Stand, was reviewed on the Quest 3 after purchasing from the Quest store on sale.