Last Flag hands-on preview — Professional hide and seek meets Overwatch

Everyone in the multiplayer space is looking to be unique. Sometimes it works, like how Helldivers 2 took over the universe. Other times it falls apart, like with Concord. Differentiating yourself isn’t easy, but the team at Night Street Games has proffered an interesting idea. At a LAN party they hosted, myself and senior editor Adam Moreno got to try Last Flag, and the concept is one I’m actively rooting for.

The concept boils down to this: you’re a character in a gameshow. In this gameshow, you and your team (it’s 5v5) are sucked through a tube onto a map, you find a good spot to hide your flag, and then have to defend it as the enemy team searches for it. All the while, you’re doing exactly the same thing as the other team, attempting to find their flag. As simple of an idea as it sounds, the complexities that reveal themselves in a match are quite intriguing.

Before we dive into the matches, let’s talk about the characters. Taking a page out of the hero shooter book, there are ten unique contestants, each with their own flair and class orientation. The variety of each one feels pretty good, with the likes of a ninja in Soo-jin who can go invisible for a short period of time but needs to get up close to do the best damage with her knives, or a teenage sharpshooter in Parker who can use his cybernetic falcon to survey the battlefield. All of them feel somewhat out of place together, but it all meshes with the funky, 1970s aesthetic. One thing’s for certain, it exudes style.

Everything takes place on a pretty large-scale map, which features a decent amount of variation. The one we got to play on was a mix of wooded farmland, with plenty of hilly areas to plan your pushes from. On the map, there are three capture points to go along with your hidden flag. These are important, as each captured point becomes a spawn spot for your team, and could win you the round if the proximity is right.

A lot of the fighting will occur over these areas, especially as they also double as health beacons, charging your health if you take some damage. There are also little cashbots roaming around, with another feature of the game becoming clear as you kill them and earn more cash by doing other objectives. Each of your abilities can get upgraded as you gain money, and that can go a long way in helping you win a match.

Watching all of the elements of Last Flag work together is a thing of beauty. While our first match certainly felt like everyone was figuring it out – it went into overtime and we only won by score rather than finding a flag – the second one was the realization of all of these abilities and cooperation. I chose the ninja, and had Adam on the boy so we could work together in finding the flag. I killed a few cashbots, upgraded my invisibility to last longer, and used it as soon as I was close to the A point. After stealthily making my way past it, which the enemy had already captured, I found their flag nestled in a rocky crag.

I didn’t want to touch it until I had my team in position, as it would reveal me along with possessing the flag. My team was still fighting over a point, but all of the sudden I saw the C point being taken by our opponents, which was the furthest away from me. This was the green light, as I could assume they were most likely on the other side of the map. Grabbing the flag, I yelled for cover as I made my way uninhibited to our team’s pyramid, which is the capture point. Adam followed a few yards away to snipe at the one opposing player who was trying to track their flag. You do still have to hold for a minute, and as the countdown continues, you get a little antsy. That said, we already had our team in the right places for the defense, and took the win with barely a single character dying the entire match.

It’s watching these kinds of tactics that make me excited about a game. It didn’t matter that we got the most kills, we outsmarted our opponent. This certainly didn’t happen every time; we got smoked twice by the co-founder of Night Street, Mac Reynolds, but if you can get a team on the same page, this can be a lot of fun.

Even after just four matches, I catch the vision of what Night Street Games is aiming at. The style of this game is fully its own – this isn’t a cash grab copy paste. While there are certainly elements of games like Team Fortress 2 and Overwatch here, Last Flag strikes out on its own in how it approaches its gameplay. There’s plenty of love that you can see woven into these unique characters, and a lot of effort in making the bones of this move together as the sinews and muscle grow over the top. Is it possibly a niche multiplayer game? Sure, but I can see this being a blast for plenty of people who want to unwind by shooting a bunch of arrows at a lumberjack. Last Flag doesn’t have a date yet, but will go into alpha testing this year. It’s going to come to PC first, but a console release is planned. You can wishlist it on Steam here.