Last Wings review for PS Vita, PS4

I’m a little shocked to learn that Last Wings isn’t a mobile game ported over to consoles. Everything about it just screams 99 cents. The basic graphics and environments. The lack of variety in the game modes. The wonky controls. If ever a game looked like a poster child for app store quality (or lack thereof), I’d have been willing to wager this was it.

But no, Last Wings is apparently making its debut on PS4 and PS Vita before it lands on Xbox One “soon”. Quite frankly, the word “inauspicious” just about covers everything you could possibly need to know.

Actually, that’s not wholly accurate — there’s one more word: “middling”. As in, middling graphics, with environments that look like they were imported from MS Paint, and planes that look completely generic. Middling audio, too, unless you’re the sort of person who prefers the sounds of tinny engines and guns that sound like popping popcorn to anything in the way of background or menu music.

The problems aren’t limited to aesthetics, either, since Last Wings’ gameplay is also pretty lacking. There are four game modes — Score Attack, Team Fight, T.F. Rounds, and Base Attack — that, for the most part, are functionally identical. While Base Attack at least throws in the wrinkle of shooting (as its name implies) at a base, the other three modes are all aerial dogfights, all the time. All of them, Base Attack, take forever to complete, since there’s pretty much no accuracy when it comes to shooting, nor do you have a particularly tight control over where your plane goes, which means you’re basically just swooping around and shooting until you happen to get lucky enough to hit your opponents a few times in a row. Combine all this with an upgrade system that only allows you to improve your planes after you’ve sunk lots and lots of time into doing the same single-round modes over and over again, and you can see how it all adds up to be a bit of a drag.

Here’s how blandly forgettable Last Wings is: as far as aerial combat games on the Vita go, its only real competition is Luftrausers, which has a glitch that makes completing 100% of the game impossible. It’s still more fun to play Luftrausers, glitch and all, than it is to play Last Wings.