The game allows you to follow and interact with a new group of characters. The tale is a new one set in the North American Rocky Mountains during the timeline between ‘Dawn of Planet of the Apes’ and ‘War for Planet of the Apes.’ Explore your own morals and ethics as you drive the fortunes of an ape troop and band of human survivors. Your decisions will have real consequences as these two worlds collide amidst a stunning backdrop. Are You Ready to Choose?
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i think i went to take a poop and forgot to unpause the game didn't feel like i missed out on anything
One of the most baffling games I've ever played, from top to bottom.
A friend of mine has let me know that he doesn't enjoy anything as much as he enjoys watching me play through shitty games. This has resulted in me getting a sugar daddy who buys me free video games (good) which all suck complete ass and usually end with me annoyed (bad). Of the games I play and stream to my friends, however, none of them ever manage to get their hooks in all of us as well as the ones by David Cage. Blowing through titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls was quick, and David Cage is a man with a pretty limited catalog. Bad interactive fiction is a dime a dozen — the runaway success of Telltale Games lead to a lot of copycats who couldn't even match their general mediocrity — but rarely do they have the right blend of absurdity that really makes titles from the Cageverse shine. Where could we go to find shitty movie-likes that could rival David Cage's worst work?
It turns out that the folly of the great man theory applies to auteur video game creators, too. David Cage, for as outspoken of a voice as he is, somehow seems to have less input on the narrative direction of his own games than his ego would imply. Titles like As Dusk Falls have shown that Cage radiates a toxic aura that seems to infect anyone who remains in his presence for the time it takes to complete a single Quantic Dream development cycle. He's like a living Lovecraftian artifact that makes you lose more of your mind the longer you're exposed to him.
One more entry into the David Cage Extended Universe (DCEU) that absolutely nobody played is Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, as brought to us by one of the co-directors of Heavy Rain. If you also didn't know that Heavy Rain had a co-director, then congratulations. We're all learning, today. His name is Steve Kniebihly, and he's every bit a hack as David Cage. He doesn't put as much virulent bigotry into his games, at least, so he's got that going for him.
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a confused game. It exists as an interquel between the middle two movies of a rebooted quadrilogy of a fifty-year-old franchise with at least five continuities. You'd think a series about what would happen if monkeys learned how to shoot reclaimed Heckler & Koch MP5s wouldn't be that complicated, but that would mean you aren't thinking like a cash-hungry film studio during the late-1960s. It's from this gray, soupy mire of plot threads and ambiguous constancy that Last Frontier attempts to develop a plot, and it's already stumbling before the starting gun has fired.
Since this game exists predominantly as a marketing tool for the film War for the Planet of the Apes, it can't do anything of consequence. Both the humans and the apes here have virtually nothing to do with any of the characters in the actual film series; there's an off-hand mention of Koba and Caesar at one point that never comes up again, the setting of the game is hundreds of miles away from those of the film, and all three of the endings and their many variations have zero impact on anything before or since. The game is so immediately dated less than five years after its release that it still advertises that it has Mixer integration. Your Mixer viewers can tune in to your Mixer stream and vote on what actions they want you to take through the Mixer chat box. They could, if Mixer still existed, but it doesn't, and the game just makes useless API calls that phone a dead address if you give it firewall permissions.
If it seems like I'm trying to avoid talking about the actual game in favor of focusing on the circumstances around it, you'd be right. This is because Last Frontier is barely a game. This is intentional; the design philosophy behind this was to make a TV movie and sell it to gamers for a $19.99 entry fee, because their standards are lower than the average Syfy viewer. That last part is paraphrasing on my part, but it's not wrong. Even then, they overestimated their writing acumen. This game bombed. Even among the people who willingly bought and played a Planet of the Apes movie tie-in game, this was seen as being a complete mess. Your only means of interacting with the game are pressing left or right to make a binary choice that can be negated within seconds by choosing the immediate opposite position right after, and an action button for timed scenes. Left, right, action button, that's all. This game has fewer controls than Pac-Man.
There's a relationship system between your player character (Jess for the humans, Bryn for the apes) and the other members of their species. It is completely arbitrary and operates on no human logic. At one point, while playing as Bryn, I went out of my way to side with my ape wife at all costs. I ended the chapter, and our relationship was listed as OKAY. The next chapter, I intentionally alternated between arguing with her and agreeing with her every other dialog option, and our relationship improved to GOOD. I don't know how this happened. Maybe she has Stepford wife syndrome.
This is an extreme budget title, and it feels like it. The game doesn't work on Windows 10, immediately crashing to desktop with the message "UE4-Apes.exe has stopped working". Plot threads come and go without any consistency. One scene gives Jess the option to toss aside her bolt-action rifle and take up an M4A1 as her everyday carry of choice. I picked this — "you gotta empty the clip if you want to kill an ape", as one of the game's two professional ape-hunters advises — and never saw it again. The developers either forgot to set the flag that would give it to me, or they ran out of money trying to render Jess in later scenes with one of two different guns and forgot to remove the option to take the M4.
These mistakes barely get noticed against the absurdity of what happens. I'm putting in line breaks here to really highlight this shit.
Clarence, the sole orangutan in the tribe of apes, gets captured and held as a POW by the humans. The ape-hunters bind him with chains, hang him by his wrists in a barn, and decide to torture him for information.
They torture an orangutan for information.
One of them menacingly leans down to Clarence and warns him that it won't end well for the apes if he doesn't start talking. He punctuates this point by beating the orangutan with a lead pipe. If Clarence doesn't tell him everything he knows about the ape tribe, the ape-hunter threatens, the humans are going to keep torturing him until he dies.
Clarence cannot speak English. They then publicly lynch him by hanging him from the neck.
It's at this point that I've started laughing so hard that I'm seeing stars. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I am losing my goddamn mind. It's 1:30 in the morning and I am causing a disturbance. I've never felt my sides burn like this. I can't catch my breath for so long that I end up hurting myself. I don't know what they were even trying to do here. There's a later scene where apes start getting loaded onto a freight train to be shipped off to an open-air ape prison that I think is supposed to be evoking Holocaust imagery, but I can't say for certain. I don't know what's happening anymore.
The apes can win, or the humans can win, and none of it matters. Who gives a shit. This might be one of the funniest games ever made.
A friend of mine has let me know that he doesn't enjoy anything as much as he enjoys watching me play through shitty games. This has resulted in me getting a sugar daddy who buys me free video games (good) which all suck complete ass and usually end with me annoyed (bad). Of the games I play and stream to my friends, however, none of them ever manage to get their hooks in all of us as well as the ones by David Cage. Blowing through titles like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls was quick, and David Cage is a man with a pretty limited catalog. Bad interactive fiction is a dime a dozen — the runaway success of Telltale Games lead to a lot of copycats who couldn't even match their general mediocrity — but rarely do they have the right blend of absurdity that really makes titles from the Cageverse shine. Where could we go to find shitty movie-likes that could rival David Cage's worst work?
It turns out that the folly of the great man theory applies to auteur video game creators, too. David Cage, for as outspoken of a voice as he is, somehow seems to have less input on the narrative direction of his own games than his ego would imply. Titles like As Dusk Falls have shown that Cage radiates a toxic aura that seems to infect anyone who remains in his presence for the time it takes to complete a single Quantic Dream development cycle. He's like a living Lovecraftian artifact that makes you lose more of your mind the longer you're exposed to him.
One more entry into the David Cage Extended Universe (DCEU) that absolutely nobody played is Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier, as brought to us by one of the co-directors of Heavy Rain. If you also didn't know that Heavy Rain had a co-director, then congratulations. We're all learning, today. His name is Steve Kniebihly, and he's every bit a hack as David Cage. He doesn't put as much virulent bigotry into his games, at least, so he's got that going for him.
Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is a confused game. It exists as an interquel between the middle two movies of a rebooted quadrilogy of a fifty-year-old franchise with at least five continuities. You'd think a series about what would happen if monkeys learned how to shoot reclaimed Heckler & Koch MP5s wouldn't be that complicated, but that would mean you aren't thinking like a cash-hungry film studio during the late-1960s. It's from this gray, soupy mire of plot threads and ambiguous constancy that Last Frontier attempts to develop a plot, and it's already stumbling before the starting gun has fired.
Since this game exists predominantly as a marketing tool for the film War for the Planet of the Apes, it can't do anything of consequence. Both the humans and the apes here have virtually nothing to do with any of the characters in the actual film series; there's an off-hand mention of Koba and Caesar at one point that never comes up again, the setting of the game is hundreds of miles away from those of the film, and all three of the endings and their many variations have zero impact on anything before or since. The game is so immediately dated less than five years after its release that it still advertises that it has Mixer integration. Your Mixer viewers can tune in to your Mixer stream and vote on what actions they want you to take through the Mixer chat box. They could, if Mixer still existed, but it doesn't, and the game just makes useless API calls that phone a dead address if you give it firewall permissions.
If it seems like I'm trying to avoid talking about the actual game in favor of focusing on the circumstances around it, you'd be right. This is because Last Frontier is barely a game. This is intentional; the design philosophy behind this was to make a TV movie and sell it to gamers for a $19.99 entry fee, because their standards are lower than the average Syfy viewer. That last part is paraphrasing on my part, but it's not wrong. Even then, they overestimated their writing acumen. This game bombed. Even among the people who willingly bought and played a Planet of the Apes movie tie-in game, this was seen as being a complete mess. Your only means of interacting with the game are pressing left or right to make a binary choice that can be negated within seconds by choosing the immediate opposite position right after, and an action button for timed scenes. Left, right, action button, that's all. This game has fewer controls than Pac-Man.
There's a relationship system between your player character (Jess for the humans, Bryn for the apes) and the other members of their species. It is completely arbitrary and operates on no human logic. At one point, while playing as Bryn, I went out of my way to side with my ape wife at all costs. I ended the chapter, and our relationship was listed as OKAY. The next chapter, I intentionally alternated between arguing with her and agreeing with her every other dialog option, and our relationship improved to GOOD. I don't know how this happened. Maybe she has Stepford wife syndrome.
This is an extreme budget title, and it feels like it. The game doesn't work on Windows 10, immediately crashing to desktop with the message "UE4-Apes.exe has stopped working". Plot threads come and go without any consistency. One scene gives Jess the option to toss aside her bolt-action rifle and take up an M4A1 as her everyday carry of choice. I picked this — "you gotta empty the clip if you want to kill an ape", as one of the game's two professional ape-hunters advises — and never saw it again. The developers either forgot to set the flag that would give it to me, or they ran out of money trying to render Jess in later scenes with one of two different guns and forgot to remove the option to take the M4.
These mistakes barely get noticed against the absurdity of what happens. I'm putting in line breaks here to really highlight this shit.
Clarence, the sole orangutan in the tribe of apes, gets captured and held as a POW by the humans. The ape-hunters bind him with chains, hang him by his wrists in a barn, and decide to torture him for information.
They torture an orangutan for information.
One of them menacingly leans down to Clarence and warns him that it won't end well for the apes if he doesn't start talking. He punctuates this point by beating the orangutan with a lead pipe. If Clarence doesn't tell him everything he knows about the ape tribe, the ape-hunter threatens, the humans are going to keep torturing him until he dies.
Clarence cannot speak English. They then publicly lynch him by hanging him from the neck.
It's at this point that I've started laughing so hard that I'm seeing stars. Tears are rolling down my cheeks. I am losing my goddamn mind. It's 1:30 in the morning and I am causing a disturbance. I've never felt my sides burn like this. I can't catch my breath for so long that I end up hurting myself. I don't know what they were even trying to do here. There's a later scene where apes start getting loaded onto a freight train to be shipped off to an open-air ape prison that I think is supposed to be evoking Holocaust imagery, but I can't say for certain. I don't know what's happening anymore.
The apes can win, or the humans can win, and none of it matters. Who gives a shit. This might be one of the funniest games ever made.