SNAP Review – Last Defense!

This is a SNAP review for Last Defense! A real-time planetary defense game for 2-6 players ages 8+. It’s published by Funko Games, and this is the best part: It’s a real-time game. It always lasts 20 minutes, We’ll tell you about it in just 5 minutes.

You play as a team of unlikely heroes who must save your city from wild, incredible threats! But you’re not super heroes, or diplomats, or soldiers. Instead, you’re characters like BBQ Dad, Construction Worker, or Soccer Champ.

Art

Last Defense is a game about unlikely heroes defending their hometown against outsized enemies. It’s completely ridiculous, and so the art had to follow. Funko did a fantastic job illustrating this game. The art is colorful, whimsical, and funny. The graphic design is great with only some small missteps.

To give you an idea of how to think of the art, imagine Fred from Big Hero Six. He’s ridiculous, and so are all the characters and situations in Last Defense!

Mechanics

To accommodate for the real time play in Last Defense!, Funko has built a slick mobile app. Fire up the app and it will give you instructions where to place the rubble and scientists to start.

Once you’re going, players take turns as fast as they can, in order. Players roll one die for the number of tools they can pick up and one for the number of spaces they can move.

Move onto spaces with scientist tokens covered by rubble tokens. When moving onto a space with rubble, flip the rubble token over to find out which tools you’ll need to clear it. Discard tools to clear the rubble to get the scientists. Get the right scientists back to the start space to eliminate the monsters terrorizing your town!

But look out, moving into a space a monster is in, or being in a space a monster moves into is trouble. You drop all of your unrescued scientists and flee to the central plaza.

Hurry up! You only have 20 minutes!

Expectations

Everything about this game is silly in a charming way. We were impressed with how smoothly the app walks players through setting up the game quickly, and confirms the player’s participation at every step.

We had never played an app-supported game from Funko and implementation of these kinds of things are a little uneven in board gaming, so we weren’t sure how it would go, but Funko did a great job with the app.

If you’re looking for a game that you expect to be ridiculous, funny, not too difficult, but a ball of fun, Last Defense! will meet your expectations.

Struggles

Last Defense! is fine for what it is, but it is very definitely a game for kids. Even at its “advanced” level, gamers will have no trouble beating the timer.

That’s fine, but it really magnifies the one big misstep of the game. The app isn’t making any use of the fact that it’s running on a display – at least when updating the players. If, when the app provided instructions, it included icons that correlated with the locations, this would be a no-reading-needed game. Unfortunately, this was a missed opportunity.

• 

• 

Thankfully, the older kids and parents in this family have fun playing Last Defense! too. We just wish it wasn’t necessary to have a reader, given how great everything else is. We also would have loved it if we were able to shorten the timer or increase the monster count to increase the difficulty. Even the advanced mode doesn’t make use of every tool available to ratchet up the difficulty when desired.

Find Last Defense! on Amazon, at the Funko shop, or your local friendly game store, for $20 or less.

---

The Family Gamers received a copy of Last Defense! from Funko Games for this review.

This post contains affiliate links, which do not change your price, but help support The Family Gamers.

SNAP review music is Avalanche, provided courtesy of You Bred Raptors?