The Last Frontier Review

The Last Frontier is a flash animation tower defense game created by Newgrounds.com user 7thelf. This strategy game was submitted to Newgrounds.com on November 20, 2009 and won a Daily 3rd Place award on November 21, 2009.

Game Background

The planet UN-10908 is out burned-out deserted planet that is being scouted for potential residence and mining. However, the scouts have now been faced with a great threat.

Gameplay

The Last Frontier is essentially a tower defense game with a bit more clicking involved. Use your mouse to position your squad units. Click on a unit, then click on one of the four main fortress walls: North, East, South, or West. Enemies can attack from all four sides. If you have sound on, the music will change to indicate that enemies are approaching. Also, you can see red arrows pointing at the enemy units. Noticing these things in advance and taken action early are key factors to being successful in this game.

At the top-left is your fortress health guide. Clicking on it will open up the status of your fortress, showing you the percent health of each main wall, as well as the percent health of each corner wall. The top-middle shows a shortcut menu, which is extremely useful for quick movements. The top-right shows you a map of the area as well as enemy units. The menu can be accessed at the bottom-left. The bottom-middle has zoom buttons that will allow you to zoom out one level and zoom back in to the original view. Zooming out lets you see more land area and possibly help you detect enemy movements earlier.

There are a number of units you can purchase between levels. These include:
-gunner
-repairman
-heavy infantry

There are also towers you can purchase. Towers cannot be moved and fire automatically.
-mortar: for ground units
-machine gun: for air units

You can also purchase repair points to repair your castle.

It should be noted that your units do have health and can die. Some enemies attack your units using bullets.

Use strategy and a combination of units to get through all 40 levels of this game.

Tips

-Though your units have health, it doesn't seem that easy for them to die, unless your castle walls come down and the bugs get in. Otherwise, you shouldn't worry about your units' healths too much, at least not in the first 20 levels or so.

-Flying guys basically target your units. Since your units can heal in-game and have quite a good bit of health, don't worry too much about losing units. Also, positioning units just to face flying enemies is not completely necessary.

-Your units regain 100% health between levels.

Review

The Last Frontier is an addicting tower defense/strategy game that will keep players playing for a long time. To be honest, I didn't really enjoy the game at first. Moving units around seemed awkward, and the shortcut commands didn't always work properly. However, after playing for a little while and overcoming those difficulties, I found this game to be quite enjoyable. There is a good variety of enemy units and a good variety of units I can purchase, creating an equal balance so one side doesn't seem overpowered. However, this game can become quite repetitive until the enemies change.

The Last Frontier scores an 8/10. Fixing shortcut command problems would help this game greatly.