The Last Salvage Squad Review – These Aliens Got Me Seeing Red

As someone who finds themselves frequently bouncing from game to game in an effort to experience as many per year as possible, either newly released or from my seemingly endless backlog, sometimes all I want is to sit down and play through something tight and briskly paced. Serving as a palette cleanser of sorts, there is just something I find inherently relaxing about stepping into a world that I know will only take a few hours to experience in its entirety. Whether it be an arcade-y rail shooter like Sin and Punishment or a cozy exploratory adventure along the lines of A Short Hike, I tend to keep an eye out for these short-form games. It happened naturally then that I stumbled across the red-hued, adrenaline-packed shooter, The Last Salvage Squad, and I’m glad that I did, as it served as a welcome breath of fresh air.

Earth’s Ditzy Defense Force

Developed by Sunfish Kumano, The Last Salvage Squad places you on an Earth that has long been ravaged by War of the Worlds-esque aliens. With humanity now fully extinct, the battle against this intergalactic threat is continued only by a small group of robots called CogrinaUnits. These 12-meter-tall humanoids are as determined and resourceful as they are ditzy, and you’ll be playing directly as these lovable bots throughout the course of the campaign.

Set across a series of 25 missions, you are sent out to dispatch hundreds of multi-legged alien enemies while recovering a modest arsenal of special weapons in the process, all in pursuit of taking the fight back to the gargantuan spaceship hovering over the Earth. Along the way, you will enlist the help of a special combat bot, named Lina, whom you will play as and fight alongside during a handful of special missions, including a pivotal one where you rescue the game’s mascot character, a Shiba Inu.

The plot is simple and effective, ensuring the game remains a breezy, fast-paced ride with minimal downtime. While little elaboration is provided expressly as to the state of the world, outside of through small mission briefs and short yet entertaining conversations, the many abandoned cities you’ll find yourself fighting through speak for themselves.

The remnants of the human race exist as vacant ruins, which often had me wondering what exactly the plan was once the alien invaders were successfully defeated, if there was one at all. I also found the post-apocalyptic world to be inherently interesting due in no small part to the game’s immediately eye-catching visuals, with the entire world seeming as though it’s crammed within a massive Nintendo Virtual Boy. This nostalgic visual presentation, combined with the energetic music and the often humorous dialogue, results in a sense of the world coming through as greater than the sum of its parts, standing out as fun and memorable despite its narrative simplicity.

Gunning For Survival Amongst Crumbling Cities

The actual action of The Last Salvage Squad takes the form of a frantic boomer shooter, with a seemingly endless onslaught of mechanical threats descending from the sky to finish off Earth’s meager resistance. While the early missions give you ample time to gain your footing by only presenting a limited number of enemy types, it doesn’t take long for the aliens to grow increasingly diverse, with each robot type possessing unique attack patterns to keep you on your toes.

Fighting against a single type of enemy naturally feels much easier to manage than dealing with a varied group, and it is during these battles against chaotic mismatches of foes that the game is easily at its most exhilarating. Similar to my experience with other shooters, I found the most effective way to control the chaos was through plenty of circle strafing and bunny hopping, while keeping an eye out for brief half-seconds of downtime to reload. If you do fall in combat, there is a generous life system in place to allow you to pick up at the start of the stage, though you’ll need to return to your destroyed body in order to recover your weapon.

Speaking of weapons, there is a modest handful that you acquire throughout The Last Salvage Squad. While you start with only a semi-automatic rifle, you quickly amass a small collection of options, including a mini-gun, a sniper rifle, a katana, and a shotgun, easily my personal favorite, among others. What I found a bit odd is that you are only able to bring a single weapon into each mission, and you have to decide prior to knowing exactly what sort of enemies you are going to be faced with.

This resulted in a couple of instances where I brought the sniper rifle into a close-quarters-focused stage, and another where I had the shotgun in a mission that seemed designed for long-range weaponry. To the game’s credit, I was still able to clear these stages, and the limitations placed on me due to my less-than-ideal choice in equipment actually ended up being quite fun, but I still would have enjoyed knowing a bit more about the contents of each mission before choosing a weapon to commit to.

Suiting Up Your Unit and Level Design Qualms

Outside of your choice of weapon, you are also presented with a couple of other avenues of customization, those being through subweapons and extensions, both of which are purchased through resource chips dropped by defeated enemies. Subweapons are limited-use items, such as hologram decoys, explosive sticky grenades, or small area-of-effect healing zones. Meanwhile, extensions take the form of passive abilities that upgrade or alter your character during combat, including faster reload speed, an enhanced double jump, and moving faster at the expense of losing some of your max health. As there is a combined limit to how many subweapons and extensions you can have equipped at once, you need to be mindful of which you opt for. I quickly found myself leaning fully into the extensions as I didn’t find most of the subweapons to feel especially impactful; by the end of the game, I was rocking an increased magazine size, faster reload speed, and the ability to heal off resource chips, which were all magnetically attracted to me from a sizeable distance away. It ruled.

In terms of the level design, I can’t say that much stood out to me, especially since the stages often felt more functional than memorable, though there are some notable exceptions, such as one mission set within a rocket-filled crater and another on top of the massive alien spacecraft. In addition, watching buildings crumble and terrain become decimated throughout the course of each mission remained consistently satisfying throughout my roughly 90-minute playthrough, and I never once felt frustrated by the layout of the levels; it’s just that many seemed to blend together a tad more than I would’ve liked.

Verdict: A Fast-Acting Dose of Nostalgia

Having just come off a long-form RPG before booting up The Last Salvage Squad, I was hoping for a fast-paced, energetic experience to serve as a refreshing change of pace; thankfully, that is exactly what I got. Despite the complexity of the gameplay systems and the underlying narrative being rather shallow, the game’s frantic FPS action, endearingly scatterbrained characters, and stylistically striking visuals all manage to culminate in a consistently chaotic and memorable 25-mission campaign that I had a lot of fun breezing through. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this unique indie title to everyone, fans of boomer-shooters and retro sci-fi works alike should find plenty to love here.