Game Reviews

Last Knight

Star onStar onStar halfStar offStar off
|
iOS
| Last Knight
Get
Last Knight
|
iOS
| Last Knight

There are a few things that endless-runners need to do well if they're going to work. Their controls need to be smooth and responsive, their engines need to run without a judder, and they need to make sure you can see enough of the road ahead to react quickly to oncoming obstacles.

Last Knight manages to mess up all three of these prerequisites. It's a shame, because there's an interesting and novel endless-runner under all the problems, but you're likely to be too frustrated to stick around long enough to find it.

Courtly displeasure

The game casts you as a podgy little knight on a podgy little horse who's careening through a fantasy mediaeval world. It's your job to steer through the obstacles, joust with the bad guys, and score as many points as you can.

There's a variety of control systems at your disposal to achieve this, but none of them is particularly good. The default one, which involves swiping to move, jump, and joust, usually ends up confused about which way your swipe moved across the screen.

Others involve different combinations of taps and swipes, but suffer from the same inaccuracy. The button choice is probably your best option, but even that gets thwarted by some poor design decisions and the general shakiness of the game.

Collision detection is poor, and it's sometimes difficult to tell whether or not your trusty steed is going to fit through the gaps the game provides for it. A camera angle that gives you barely any time to react compounds matters.

Broken lance

It's a huge shame, because there's a brilliant game somewhere here. The sections where you have to joust against other knights should be fun, and the setting just drips with possibilities. Unfortunately, Last Knight can't pull it off.

Too often you'll clip an obstacle and be thrown off, or be forced to contend with jumps too close to the end of jousting sections that you can't hope to clear. The game always feels like a bumpy, unfinished ride, rather than the silky experience you need from an endless-runner.

There's potential here, but that potential goes unfulfilled thanks to a host of problems that pile up the frustration before any of the seeds the game plants have time to lay down roots.

yt
Subscribe to Pocket Gamer on

Last Knight

While there might be flashes of a decent game, more often than not Last Knight is disappointing
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.