The Last Dogma Review

Unpolished, unacceptable, and unbelievably bad. The game opens with a tutorial that made me think that my gaming experience would be one filled with wit and parody, however I was sorely disappointed about five minutes after completing the tutorial. The game is filled with some very disappointing experiences because of how incomplete the game feels and its lack of direction. The game creators claim that Dogma is for fans of The Stanley Parable so one would expect a certain level of quality, unfortunately it fails to provide any whatsoever. The game tries to be clever and fails to do so other than during the tutorial. This review is going to last about as long as the game did for me. In other words it’s going to be a short one folks.

The Last Dogma starts out in a witty tutorial narrated by a British voice actor who immediately dives into bemoaning how controls for all video games are now exactly the same. He even goes as far to say, “Do I even need to explain how to use left click to shoot?”. This shows a lot of fun potential to continue making a parody of the gaming industry; however this promise is short-lived when the game shows off its very poor storyline and lack of attention to detail.

The game’s story become extremely confusing and I’m still left wondering if it was making fun of most game’s lack of story, or if the story was just that bad. It actually feels as if the developers tried to put together a jumble of different genres that ends up becoming nothing more than a disorganised mess. You play as Sebastian Arist, an ATF officer who is tasked with finding and killing weapon dealers, however the rest of the game trails off from this.

After completing the tutorial, you are dumped right into the game with no prompts or objective markers on what exactly you are supposed to be doing. You can walk up to a variety of NPCS, however none of them will actually say anything helpful to you about your objectives. On occasion you are also able to say different things to the same NPC, however it does not actually impact the game whatsoever. This brings to mind the question of whether this is an intentional shot at the gaming industry and how the choices you make have little to no impact on how the game progresses, or if this was just a gimmick that The Last Dogma developers decided to throw in.

Thinking that the game’s story and mechanics weren’t that great, I had hopes that there would be some stunning visuals to compensate, unfortunately this was not the case. I am not sure how the creators managed it, but there are literally holes in the game world that should not exist. Many of the game’s doorways actually have some kind of barrier that rises about 2 inches above the bottom of a doorframe so you have to jump just to walk through a doorway. Not only are the doorways poorly designed, the actual floors on some of the buildings don’t line up properly, so you get caught on edges. At one point there was even a piece of floor that wasn’t solid and I ended up being stranded and forced to revert to a previous save.

The Last Dogma attempts to mock the current gaming industry, but all it does is make fun of itself in its poor attempts at satire. The game is so clunky and buggy that it was actually hard to tell at times, if the game actually making fun of something or if I had come across yet another bug in the game. This game feels more like it tried to use satire to cover up the fact that it is in fact a boring, buggy, and overall crappy game. The only fun I had in this game was with the tutorial with its witty instruction to follow the same controls as every other shooter game, and even that wore thin very quickly. The AI is poorly done, you get caught on pieces of the level, and it is full of spelling and grammatical errors that you will definitely notice. I would not recommend picking this game up, even if you enjoy games that make fun of themselves. In all honesty, this was just a buggy piece of garbage.