ANNIE:Last Hope – PS5 Review

ANNIE:Last Hope (their grammar, not ours) is a twin-stick shooter/zombie survival game from the mysterious developers Pixel Rice.  And by mysterious we mean they haven’t got any kind of online presence that we could find.  Originally released in 2020 on Steam, the game has been ported over to PSN and published by NiuGamer.

This is quite a strange game.  On the face of it, it’s just another top-down twin-stick shooter.  PSN is full of them.  But ANNIE definitely has some quirks to it.  Set in the ’90s, the game starts of with you playing as Jack during a zombie outbreak which has been caused by infected crabs (so probably in Sheffield then, arf!).  Starting out at street level, you have to battle through the zombies with nothing but a pistol in an effort to get to safety.  There’s talk of a shopping mall that has been secured by the army but to get there you need to go through the subway system.

With you is the titular Annie, Jack’s fiancé, who isn’t really much use and just hides every time there is an encounter with the massed undead.  But just as Jack starts making progress (which basically means finding the next exit and reuniting lost kids with their parents), Jack goes missing and from that point you play as Annie.  The main difference now is that Annie is a hardened hunter in the Ellie (The Last of Us) mode.  You’re armed with a slow, but reasonably powerful, bow (with infinite arrows) but aside from that the gameplay doesn’t change much.

With its voxel-style graphics there’s definitely a faux-retro look to everything but ANNIE‘s strength is in how it puts everything together on the screen.  Sure the zombie crabs look silly and the human characters look weirdly deformed but the game does a good job of building up an atmosphere.  From its opening in the city to the latter stages where you’re out in the country, everything looks pretty good.  Maybe not when it comes to the closest scrutiny of the graphics but in terms of the direction, the way the camera lingers on certain scenes.  You can tell The Last of Us was a big inspiration here and it shows.  Sure, it’s the 10p Temu version but there’s still a bit of artistry to it all.  This isn’t a throwaway game.

And with a reasonably okay story, some good locations, a handful of challenging bosses and set pieces and a few weapons to find and purchase, there’s quite a bit of substance to the game.  If anything it reminded us of the Telltale Games’ Walking Dead series a little.  Drama on a budget.

But it’s not all good news.  We’re kind of conflicted by this one because for everything it does right, it’ll do something badly.  Firstly, the actual shooting mechanics are pretty awful thanks to the aggressive auto-aiming.  You can turn off your laser-sighting on your aiming but not the auto-aim itself which is not only too powerful but it’s also wildly inaccurate.  It’s the worst of both worlds.  And then you’ve got the level design which often saw us running around trying to find the exit which is never highlighted and generally always a pain to spot.

The game has no voice acting and so the story plays out in text-based dialogues that are full of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.  Hey, none of us are perfect but it’s a constant issue with this game.  And whenever we see stuff like that we just wonder if the game ever got play-tested properly.  This is a four year old game, such mistakes should have been corrected by now.  And while we appreciated the fact that the story had a bit of ambition to it, the characters here aren’t fleshed out at all with a few antagonists being cartoonishly evil with no real explanation.  Right down to the guy most responsible for the whole zombie mess in the first place.

However, the game’s length is just about right and it’s pretty linear which might not be your bag but that’s the kind of thing we like around here.  The game doesn’t overstay its welcome (5-6 hours should do it) and you’re able to change difficulty levels on the fly which is nice.  Especially if you get stuck on one of the more difficult bosses.

So, in the end we’re in two minds about Annie.  We appreciated the story but not the way it was told.  We liked the setting but often found ourselves running around figuring out where to go next.  The visuals are kind of basic but also occasionally quite beautiful.  The combat is quite engaging but with stodgy, unintuitive mechanics.  It feels cheap but not throwaway at the same time.  It’s just a weird game.  But it tries something a little ambitious and it mostly achieves it.