The Last Guardian review

Game Info
Platform PS4
Publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment
Developer GenDesign
Release Date Dec 6, 2016

The Last Guardian is torn between multiple generations, awkwardly straddling each era of its development simultaneously.

The game was originally announced in 2007 as a PlayStation 3 title, but its legacy goes back even further. It's technically a long-awaited follow-up to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two fan-favorite PlayStation 2 games. The Last Guardian has been in the works in some form or another for nearly a decade, and the wear of that age shows.

The Last Guardian escapes the frustration of its rustier design elements at key moments. GenDesign — the new studio started by Ico and Shadow of the Colossus mastermind Fumito Ueda — set out to create a game that builds an emotional bond between the player and Trico, a strange bird-cat hybrid creature. What The Last Guardian accomplishes with Trico and the player's investment is impressive, but it never fully overtakes the game's weaknesses.

The Last Guardian has been in the works for nearly a decade, and the wear of that age shows

The Last Guardian begins with the unnamed main character, a young boy, waking up in the ruins of some strange castle-like structure. He's been kidnapped from his village and must figure out a way to escape. Soon after waking, he encounters the aforementioned Trico in a beaten-down, near-death state. Your first goal as the main character is to hunt down some food for Trico and figure out how to ease its pain.

This is a recurring activity throughout the game. Many of the challenges in The Last Guardian are based around figuring out how to help Trico progress through an area too small for its massive frame, and finding barrels of the strange substance that Trico eats to give it fuel and urge it forward. The puzzles based around helping navigate Trico through tricky areas held my interest just fine.

The barrels, though ...

Your quest to find barrels for Trico illustrates one of The Last Guardian's more frustrating obsessions. GenDesign loves its wonky, faux-realistic, not-very-fun physics system. Time and again, the game tasks you with pushing, pulling or throwing objects through some sort of mini-obstacle course in order to get them to Trico or some other goal. Barrels are the worst offenders; they would bounce ridiculously all over the scenery after I'd toss them to a nearby platform, often rolling right back down to where I started.

The Last Guardian screenshot

The problem isn't limited to barrels, of course. The core of this issue is how The Last Guardian handles controls. You're playing as an awkward kid, and the game goes out of its way to make it feel like it. He stumbles when he runs; he has trouble holding onto Trico's feathers with both hands. Good luck pushing a box in a straight line. And even though there's quite a bit of leaping from platform to platform in The Last Guardian, the main character's jumps are small, stiff and often difficult to judge.

If the main character annoys because he moves exactly as you'd expect a little boy to, then Trico annoys because it acts exactly as you'd expect a cat to act. If the creature isn't refusing to move until you bring it food, it's casually ignoring your shouts from across the level. When I wasn't trying to motivate Trico forward, I spent much of the game riding on top of the creature, grasping onto its feathers for dear life as it leapt to faraway vantage points (much more gracefully than the main character ever could, at least).

You depend on Trico for carrying you from area to area, but the creature is also a big part of the solution for many puzzles. You must learn to communicate orders to it, which in practice means pressing the right shoulder button to yell at Trico, sometimes paired with one of the PlayStation 4 controller's other buttons to issue a more specific command, like "jump" or "go over there."

I'm doing a bit of interpreting here, because frustratingly, despite nonstop tooltips explaining how to do stuff that you were taught hours ago, The Last Guardian never actually specifies what each command means. On top of that, Trico may ignore your commands if it feels like it, which turns any puzzle that depends on the creature's help into an aggravating waiting game.

It makes for a realistic depiction of a cat, but it's terrible gameplay
The Last Guardian screenshot

I mean "waiting game" quite literally, by the way. In numerous cases I would give up on a puzzle and set down the controller, turning away from the screen. When I turned back 10 or 15 minutes later, Trico would inexplicably, finally be in the position I had been trying to get it into when I gave up. It feels like the game is emulating real cat behavior by putting in some hidden timer before it will listen to you. It makes for a realistic depiction of my favorite house pet, but it's terrible gameplay.

Not all of The Last Guardian is this full of frustration. The game introduces some fun mechanics, such as using a shield to target enemies and obstacles that Trico will then destroy. It also features some truly astounding setpieces, visually breathtaking stuff that helped me understand precisely why this game may not have worked on last-gen hardware. On my launch PlayStation 4, the more impressive and fast-paced moments caused serious frame rate drops.

These setpieces often demonstrate what is, by far, the most impressive piece of The Last Guardian: its map design. While the strange land full of crumbling ruins and sprawling towers doesn't make a lot of logical sense, by the end of the game I realized how intricately designed it was. Every piece of this world actually fits together, with areas looping in on themselves and the game often taking you on surprise tours of a space you've already been through.

Also by the end of the game I was, without a doubt, fully emotionally invested in Trico. Despite the myriad gameplay annoyances of trying to get this creature to move in the right way, The Last Guardian successfully tugged on my heart strings over and over again. I'm staying vague here because I don't want to spoil anything, but the game hits sentimental high notes that, against all odds, don't feel cheap or unearned.

Wrap Up:

The Last Guardian bounces between highs and lows without ever fully living up to its legacy

How I wish that more of The Last Guardian could have lived up to its own spectacle. The easy shorthand that many have used is that it feels like a PlayStation 2 game — I even said so myself a few months ago — but the reality is more complicated than that. In its best moments, The Last Guardian pulls off feats that could only be done on modern hardware; at its weakest, it's not just "like a PlayStation 2 game," but like a particularly rough, unpolished PlayStation 2 game, one that recalls the legacy of its forebears, but can't quite recreate it.

The Last Guardian was reviewed using a pre-release retail PlayStation 4 download code provided by Sony. You can find additional information about Polygon's ethics policy here.

About Polygon's Reviews
7.5 PS4