Last Day on Earth: A fun survival game for Android

Survival and resource collection games are all the rage these days. Last Day on Earth jumps outside the box for the standards of this genre on the Android platform to offer an original title that draws on various sources of inspiration. In this exploration game you’ve got to trek across zombie-infested rural settings while you collect the raw materials to build a shelter and create all sorts of survival gadgets.

You control your character directly with a D-pad and virtual buttons, moving around the settings in real time and interacting with objects or attacking bad guys. To make tools, clothes, or items for your shelter you have to get the raw materials listed on each blueprint – and to find those you have to invest the creation points you’ll get as you level up. The more elaborate the projects, the more experience you’ll need in extracting materials and defeating creatures.

The other focus of this experience is that you have to make long trips between the different game maps. This isn’t one giant level, but rather several small locations you can access from any other point. The problem is that these long trips require a fixed period of time to get through (from 10 to 60 minutes of real time) that you can save by spending energy points to zip from one spot to another instantaneously. Luckily these points take time to accrue so you can take advantage of the system.

So what’s the hidden underside of these long trips? Well, at advanced stages of the game, you may be attacked by other characters, besides suffering daily assaults by zombie hordes right on your own base, with them taking down walls and doors. That said, the online mode doesn’t have real players, meaning despite the fact that you sometimes come across other hostile survivors, they move around automatically, and the nearby shelters you try to attack won’t be populated by real characters, though their defenses will remain in place.

Last Day on Earth is a super interesting proposal that cleverly adapts a game system halfway between Minecraft and DayZ, where the obvious gaps in the platform are patched over with smart decisions that let you enjoy the game in both short and longer sessions.