Remember the Mortal Engines film that came out a few years ago? Me neither, but something that could scratch that itch for massive roving machines is on its way, as Last Oasis is heading into early access this week – and I’ve had an early look via an online press demo.
First unveiled in January last year, Last Oasis is a post-apocalyptic MMO survival game with an enticing hook: you’re a nomad in a vast desert which can be traversed with rickety wooden walkers, sent out by society to collect resources and ensure humanity’s survival. The lore behind this explains that Earth’s rotation has stopped, meaning the planet is split into fiery desert and extreme cold, with a small sliver of hospitable land in the middle. As the sun moves, the nomads must also travel to avoid the burning rays. It’s a clever backstory, but is it enough to separate it from the crowd of other survival MMOs?
During the early stages, Last Oasis shares many of the mechanics you’d expect to see in survival games like Rust: harvesting wood, crafting better tools, and a tech tree that can be expanded with technology gathered from old wrecks and settlements. While ranged combat is an option on the walkers, we were also shown hand-to-hand melee, which aims to provide more depth than other survival games by tracking whether players click on the right or left-hand side of the screen, with melee hits corresponding to these in-game. As the same mechanic works for blocking, it means there’s some level of reflexive skill rather than just spamming – and a stamina bar means you’ll have to deploy your hits carefully.
Thankfully things get interesting quite early on – your first machine, an insect-style walker, doesn’t require too many materials and plays a key role in allowing you to explore the vast environment (and providing a valuable respawn point). Players load into hexagonal worlds called oases, which in turn connect to a bunch of others across the globe as part of a larger world map. To travel between these is quick, but requires water, a valuable resource which also powers the machines you use to climb over sand dunes and find more resources. Early-stage walkers can’t hold an awful lot of water, and therefore can’t take you very far, prompting players to search for ways to upgrade or swap their machines. You get the idea.
As all the tiles and servers are connected across the globe (allowing European and American players to intermingle, for instance) I was a little worried about potential latency problems, but Donkey Crew project lead Florian Hofreither assured me this wouldn’t be an issue.