Last Anime Boy: Saving Loli is an FPS in the veins of earlier games of the genre such as Wolf 3D. It takes place in the year 2088 as the Nazi Muslims have taken control and banned everything good in life with the rest of the plot being equally as ridiculous and not something I necessarily want to repeat here. We start off the game in a bland looking area with an enemy directly outside guarding the room. You can open the door, but that is ill-advised as you have no way to defend yourself from the ensuing gunfire. Instead, you must search the room until you find a metal pipe to bash your opponent with and begin your quest to become the ultimate anime boy.
I’m not going to hold off on saying this, the game is horrible and you would do well to steer clear of it. One of the first things you’ll no doubt notice is the god awful controls. The dev’s found it to be a good idea to modernize it by using the mouse to aim and “wasd” to move, which is fair enough if it weren’t for the fact that the mouse does not work. What that means is that you will use wasd to move, the arrow keys to look around, and then have to reach all the way over to the mouse & left click to fire. That last one is what really ruins it. It would have been semi-tolerable if we could use the Ctrl key to shoot like the old days or even better, be allowed to rebind the senseless key bindings ourselves. As it is, playing this game is far too cumbersome to be in any way enjoyable.
There are no difficulty options and given the fact that the controls are barely usable, you’d think it would severely lower your survival rate. Nope. You’d have to seriously go out of your way and try to be killed with how little damage enemies inflict. You will lose 2% of your health with each projectile that connects and none are hit-scan. Even then, it is no easy task to avoid them, once again due to the controls. Enemies can also fire them at very unnatural angles or straight through doors which doesn’t help matters. While you are unlikely to ever die to them, it still makes combat in this game incredibly annoying, and it is always better to take a few hits to quickly put your foes down. That essentially means you will always be rushing towards your enemies so even when you find a gun, your method of attacking stays the same as when you had a pipe.
At first, there are only men in white tank tops to deal with. They dual fire pistols and go down easily. Other foes you’ll later encounter are people with bombs strapped to them that cause a bit more damage and surprisingly enough never explode, a big hulking mechanical man that goes down laughably easy, and finally a melee fighter that walks with his hands. There are four enemy variants in total with all of them yelling “Allah Akbar” as soon as they spot you. And they are likely to spot you first since the view distance is absolutely terrible. Aside from the pipe, you also get your hands on a pistol and a rifle. The rifle is entirely useless as it doesn’t cause more damage and its projectile moves incredibly slowly. One really has no reason to use it over the hit-scan pistol as both use the same type of ammo and it’s not like bullets are sparse to begin with.
Your primary objective is not to kill everything that moves but to save children from their clutches. They are essentially keycards though only one actually unlocks the exit to the level, so once you find her, you can leave the rest to their fate. Good luck finding the exit however, as to no one’s surprise the level design here is abhorrent. Everything is placed without rhythm or reason with the environments all appearing identical, making it even harder to navigate. There is often little in the way of landmarks, and the drab color palette of gray with the occasional far too bright yellow do little to keep your attention. Funnily enough, there is actually a mini-map you could pop up by pressing F1. Thing is that feature doesn’t work and all that appears is a black square on your screen.
This is one ugly game and it kills me that I couldn’t find some way to either record or take screenshots of it. All that you’ve seen are directly from the store page and while still awful to look at, they do not truly capture how bad it gets. The girls look straight out of the Atari 2600, there is occasional out of place giant grass that completely blocks your view, and it is nearly devoid of any props to bring any life to the empty halls. Every stage is rather small so you’ll eventually find what you need and emerge victorious, though the further it progresses, the worse the level design becomes. Level 4 is just a confusing cluster of randomly placed doors in a maze that overlaps itself three times and level 5 is just a couple of small rooms with no way to progress further which is probably for the best.
Look, I get that this is a meme game and that nobody would ever expect anything out of it, but it takes some talent to screw up the simple Wolf 3D formula so badly. Not only that, this title also comes off as pretty malicious instead of made for the “lawls” since they have the audacity to sell a DLC that merely marks the right girl you need while their title is a barely functional mess. If you are anything like me and simply love to play dumb or weird indie games, this is not a title you should consider despite its insane name and premise.
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