HomeReviewsLast Oasis
Premature Evaluation: Last OasisChampagne superMMOva
Champagne superMMOva
Developer:Donkey CrewPublisher:Donkey Crew
Release:Out nowOn:WindowsFrom:SteamFor:£23.80, $30, €27
Last Oasisis the most recent culprit, a multiplayer craft ‘em up set on the narrow habitable strip of a tidally locked Earth, between the half that’s being baked and the half that’s being frozen, in which you ride around on strandbeests in search of water, food and the various bits of garbage required to keep you alive. What is a strandbeest? They’rethe real-world creation of Dutch artist Theo Jansen: various multi-legged, wind-powered kinetic structures that resemble K’nex figures and skitter across beaches like scorpions made of chopsticks. They exist in the space between art and engineering, says the artist, and are neither living nor dead, though if we’re being pragmatic, they’re exactly as alive as a bag of broom handles rolling down a hillside.
Strandbeest clearly captured the imaginations of the developers ofLast Oasis, who have placed them front and centre of their unique open world adventure. You’re a nomad on a rite of passage, ejected from your home aboard the flotilla – an unseen, city-size strandbeest that scoots around the only bit of the planet that’s still the right temperature – and forced to scramble for survival in an environment that handily contains everything you could possibly require, just lying about on the ground.
At the game’s outset you’re a veritable resource hoover. Tapping away at the harvest key while simply running in a straight line fills your inventory with copious amounts of the usual suspects – wood, stone and fibre – until you’ve got all the detritus you need to start chipping away at the game’s blossoming tech tree, constructing campfires to distill water from cactus flesh and building spinning wheels to weave fibre into useful cloth. It’s not long until you’re able to build your very own, personal-sized walker, which you can then ride around the desert like a land-faring pedalo.
The small walkers are unexpectedly fun to drive too, capable of reaching speeds that can send them whizzing over the lips of sand dunes. The bigger walkers are forever creaking in oaken agony, like they’re always seconds away from collapsing into a pile of splinters.
From the moment you’ve got a vehicle, you spend much of your time raiding rupu camps for the parts needed to construct ever more elaborate walkers, which require increasingly large player crews in order to properly staff and operate. Last Oasis is a co-operative and clan-focused MMO, and while it’s perfectly possible to scoot about on your lonesome, everything about the game funnels you towards teaming up with other players aboard super-sized strandbeest and then bullying or subjugating any weaker nomads you encounter. Oases exist as instanced zones across the world map, and the largest walker in any given oasis – for as long as it can hold its position against any chancers – is granted ownership of that area and most of its resources.
For conflict-averse me that’s always the least appealing part of these kinds of MMOs, which often seek to appeal to new players just enough to create a steady stream of human fodder for its handful of heavily invested, prized veterans. Those multiplayer survival games that shovel novice players into the meat grinder are like a snake eating its own tail, or how the Matrix had to be designed with just enough misery and hardship that masochistic human brains would find it plausible. I’m a PvE boy, and I don’t care who knows it.
Your mileage may vary, but I much prefer the parts of Last Oasis in which I’m completely alone, eating mind-altering, psychoactive cactus berries to put in me in the trance-like state required to imagine a new kind of walker, or using a grappling hook to rappel into an unsuspecting rupu’s hut like some post-apocalyptic Spider-Man in search of vines and pelts.
