If you haven’t heard of The Last Guy, the game came out last summer, preceded by an “interesting”developer diary video. It’s a classic and addictive “line” game with simple controls that uses satellite maps of real cities around the world, including San Francisco, Tokyo, and Sydney, as its levels. You play a hero who rescues people hiding out in buildings and leads them to the safety zone for evacuation while avoiding zombie monsters that roam the streets. The bigger the line, the bigger the bonus. But bigger lines also make it harder to avoid monsters, who make people scatter when they get close.

You can use thermo vision to see where people are hiding, and pick up power-ups scattered throughout the levels to stop time, fill up your energy meter and more. The game is available now for $9.99 on the PS Store, and there’s even a demo if you want to try it out before you buy it.

Here’s a trailer to get an idea of what the game is about and what the visuals look like.

There will be 15 Trophies in all to reward you for getting good ratings on stages, rescuing VIPs, getting lots of fireworks and more. The Trophies are not retro-active, meaning they won’t be unlocked automatically when the update is installed. You’ll need to play the game again to unlock them.

I also am pleased to announce an add-on coming for The Last Guy next month. It will add 3 bonus stages to the game, which are unlocked by fulfilling certain conditions in the main game. The add-on also includes 8 additional Trophies to help you rank up your Trophy level.

Enjoy!

If you haven’t heard of The Last Guy yet, here’s the run-down. Every stage is a real city, shown from overhead using detailed aerial photography. Basically you make your way through cities, find people hiding in buildings, and lead them to the Escape Zone while avoiding zombies roaming the streets. Use thermography vision to find people hiding in buildings, “dash” to run away quicker, and “huddle” to scrunch up the line to keep the people out of the path of the zombies. The controls are simple, but keeping your line away from the zombies and making it to the Escape Zone without losing anyone is anything but.

We released the demo last week, giving a taste of half of the Asakusa, Tokyo stage, one of the many stages in The Last Guy. I hope you’ve had a chance to check it out. If you’re anything like me, you probably have that song stuck in your head too.

Well, I’m back here on the blog today because I’m here to announce that the full North American release of The Last Guy will be hitting the North American PlayStation Store tomorrow afternoon for $9.99! And you can purchase the game from the PlayStation Store, or from right inside the demo itself. How handy is that?

With the full game, you’ll get to experience the full Asakusa stage from the demo, plus a bunch of other exciting cities from around the world, with 15 stages in all. Of course there’s London and Los Angeles, which we originally mentioned. And in the latest trailer above you can see cities like Washington, D.C., Sydney, Berlin, and Chinatown in Yokohama, Japan. There are lots of other great cities waiting to be saved by you in the full game, plus a bunch of different kinds of zombies and boss zombies for you to outwit and out-maneuver. You’ll definitely have to use the power-ups scattered throughout each stage wisely to make it through each of the 15 stages.

Here are a few cool screenshots from some of the new cities, Berlin and San Francisco.

So you have until tomorrow afternoon to practice with the demo to perfect your line-leading zombie-avoiding skills, thermography powers, building-encircling technique, and Stamina gauge management. Because the levels in the full game are much more challenging, and even feature online rankings and different ratings for how well you do (like how many VIPs you find and rescue). Who knows, maybe something cool will happen if you get a good “clear” rating on all the levels…

By the way, there will be a couple of cool The Last Guy wallpapers on the store tomorrow as well. Hope you like ‘em!

Let me know what you think of the demo, and the full game when it comes out tomorrow. Thanks!

Before I say too much else about it, fire up this first-look gameplay trailer to learn a little bit about the premise of the game:

Pretty crazy, right? The trailer talks a bit about the story, but here’s some more detail. Set some time in the 21st century, a mysterious purple ray hits Earth, turning anyone touched by the light into a monster or zombie. With zombies roaming the streets, unaffected people lucky enough to have been inside a building when the ray hit are anxiously holding their collective breath, waiting for someone to rescue them. As The Last Guy, you are the survivors’ last hope to survive this global crisis. Actually, the hero of the game is himself a zombie from the Himalayan mountains, on a quest to save the remaining humans from the zombies that have infested it.
Go forth and save!!

As for the gameplay, here’s a basic rundown. The Last Guy is a fast-paced and addictive classic arcade style game with simple controls. The game uses real-life aerial maps of various cities around the world, including Tokyo, London and Los Angeles. As the player, you are the last remaining hope in each of these cities to rescue mankind from the zombies roaming the streets. As you navigate the city, you gather survivors hidden throughout buildings and other nooks and crannies in the city. Once rescued, the nervous survivors will form a line behind you. The objective is to lead them back to the Escape Zone so the United Rescue Force can pick them up and whisk them off to safety.

To complete a stage, you have to get enough survivors back to the escape zone before time runs out. Which isn’t as easy as it looks, because if zombies get too close, the people in line scream and scatter back into the buildings, meaning you have to rescue them again. So you’ll want to keep everyone as far away from the zombies as possible.

Along the way, you will encounter 10 types of zombies , not including tougher “boss” enemies. As the Last Guy, you possess special powers like thermography or heat vision to help you see where survivors are hiding. You’ll also find helpful power-ups, like freezing time, warping back to the escape zone and temporary invisibility, scattered throughout the city to help avoid the pesky zombies.

Well, that’s it for now. There will be much more about The Last Guy in the weeks to come. Thanks!