Last Alert
System: Turbo CD
Release Date: November 1990
Developer: Laser Soft
Publisher: NEC
Genre: Shoot ‘em Up
You are Guy Kazama, a one man army in Last Alert! You’ve been tapped to kill thousands of bad guys and foil the ambitions of the evil Force Project. Laser Soft is part of Telenet Japan, so unsurprisingly, this is a very similar experience to Final Zone II. There’s some really bad voice acting in the very similarly styled cut scenes. The final bad guy you kill, Dr. Garcia, sure looks like Dr. Alif Ruman, doesn’t he? This globetrotting affair puts you through 23 stages of heart-pounding action.
There are six different primary guns that you unlock by gaining experience through killing enemies and completing objectives. Guy starts as a Ranger and gains many new titles as he murders baddies, including Metal Soldier, Mad Thunder, and Super Hero. Once you unlock it, you probably don’t need anything but the Heavy Machine Gun. With it’s five way shot, you can mow everyone down without issue. You may think the final weapon you unlock is the best one, but the Missile Launcher is really a niche weapon with limited use. Same goes with the Grenade Launcher because its fire rate is low. The Uzi with its rapid fire shot and M16 with its three bullet spread are definitely useful while they are the best weapons you have.
There are a number of secondary weapons available, as well. These are limited by item pickups that either exist or are unlocked by destroying items or enemies. These all act as I expected. The grenade gives a bit of splash damage around where it lands. The missile shoots in four directions around you and sometimes seeks out enemies. The Satellite adds orbs at your sides that shoot and also block incoming projectiles. The disc launcher throws out four razor discs in diagonal directions. Finally, the flamethrower shoots ahead in the direction you’re facing and is really nice when fighting certain bosses. You are capped at 9 of each secondary weapon and they are rather plentiful, so don’t just stockpile them. Enjoy them. Most of the time, what you really want enemies to drop is a medkit to replenish your health.
Several times during your adventure, you can choose the order of levels you play. You still have to play them all and I don’t think it really makes a difference, but it’s a nice sense of player agency. The time limit is a real obstacle in the levels. You can’t screw around in the later stages or you’ll run out of time. Most levels, designated by blue, are just kill everything and make your way to a boss levels, but there are two other variations. Yellow levels have you completing an objective before you fight the boss. The red levels are stealth levels that require you to only use your Colt or risk alerting more enemies.
Each act leads up to killing one of the bosses of Force Project. They give you a line before you fight them, of which I enjoy Colonel Kadat and Guy’s retort to him. Levels aren’t incredibly long, but you do have to stay on task because death means you lose all of your secondary weapons. This isn’t usually a big deal because you can collect more. Well, until the final level, where you only get a flamethrower, a missile, and a satellite for the final bosses. It took me several tries to figure out the pattern of the last battle, but after finally destroying the end boss, the final cut scenes wouldn’t load! Good thing YouTube exists…
Graphics: 3.0
Characters and stages look very nice. The cut scenes are good, but mostly just still photos with mouths moving.
Sound: 3.0
Sound quality is great. The voice over is awful. Just terrible. Laughable, really.
Gameplay: 3.5
The controls are great. You get a lot of guns, you can switch among them easily. It’s nice.
Difficulty: 3.0
It’s really easy to run through each level blowing everything away, but there’s a big difficulty spike at the very end.
Fun Factor: 3.5
I enjoyed myself a lot. I thought the game was fun to play, the story made some semblance of sense.
Overall Rating: 3.2
Last Alert earns a B+. Overall, this is a really good game that you should try if you’re into run and gun shoot ‘em ups.