The Last Hope on Switch: an absolute disaster and the worst game we've ever tested

From APB Reloaded to Life of Black Tiger and beyond, we've covered some real stinkers on Digital Foundry - hell, the Ghost of Phoenix Past even left us a hot, steaming gift of twelve horribly bad Phoenix games a few years back. I knew bad games - or so I thought. You see, while the unearthing of ET cartridges buried deep in a landfill in 2014 may have made headlines at the time, it turns out that the Nintendo eShop is becoming the landfill of the digital age. Every week, the shop is flooded with a selection of low-budget rubbish that would make Steam blush. However, I was not prepared for the journey I would soon take with The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival and other 'games' produced by the junk factory known as West Connection Limited.

If you're looking for a suitable alternative to licking the toilet bowl, West Connection Limited has you covered. They're bringing a veritable buffet of unfinished, barely functional smoking hot garbage to the table that makes LJN look like Nintendo. In building its catalogue of fetid bile, West Connection has mastered the art of the SEO game through a collection of vaguely assembled words designed explicitly to fool customers into wasting their money and time. Like Call of Duty or Battlefield? Try World War: Battle Heroes Field Armies Call of Prison Duty Simulator - or maybe Counter Bottle Shooter: Pro Aim Master Target Bottle Shoot 3D Game Strike Pistol.

These guys understand how to maximise results within the eShop's horrific search system, but it's The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival that really put West Connection on the map for many of us when its "key art" went viral on social media, essentially featuring Ellie from The Last of Us with the serial number filed off. The tactic worked and the digital detritus spread like wildfire across the internet.

The game begins with the Unity splash screen, followed by a completely static title screen that resembles the key art from UbiSoft's The Division. You're presented with three options - New Game, Loading and Controls. If you choose New Game, you're treated to a series of still images, with poorly written slides explaining the situation. The premise involves a time machine, zombies and the government. The game then loads into an exceptionally choppy first-person cutscene showing your character waking up in a hospital room. Welcome to The Last Hope, I guess. You play as time-travelling commando Brian on his quest to... I don't know, save humanity? It's not really clear.

Your first objective is to leave the hospital, and it's here that you'll start to feel your soul slipping away. The hospital consists of three rooms, all divided by loading screens - your hospital room, a hallway and a staircase. The framerate is completely unlocked and wildly unstable from the start, though it will get much worse before we are finished. It does run at native 1080p in docked mode and 720p in portable which is nice on paper but given the performance it probably shouldn't.

Once you reach the bottom of the stairs, however, you're greeted by a much longer loading screen that eventually takes you into the city. The entirety of this game takes place in and around this U-shaped street littered with zombies and muscle cars. The world is slathered in low resolution, repeating textures with virtually no lighting. Shadows are exceptionally low-res and barely coherent.

The Last Hope boasts a fully dynamic frame-rate which can range from 60fps all the way down to an eye-popping 15! In certain instances, the game appeared to break with visible glitching appearing across the screen. Weird blooming artefacts, flickering shadows and broken alpha textures. Even worse, opening any door in the game has a small percentage chance of crashing the game causing you to lose all progress. Oh, and when you reboot the game, there's also a risk of hitting the New Game option by accident as the main menu is active beneath the Unity splash screen. Whoops.

All story telling is handled via text boxes which often awkwardly intersect with other UI elements. As I noted earlier, there is no voice acting in this game and the writing itself makes Twitter posts read more like Tolstoy. Oh and then there's the soundtrack - apart from a song in the main menu, there's just one song in actual gameplay, if you count what sounds like a recording of somebody snoring as a soundtrack. This is the only ambient sound in the entire game and you will hear it from start to finish.

Somehow though, it's the design and economy of this game that fascinates me the most. This is basically a 15-minute game if you play it correctly but it's very easy to break the game entirely. To understand this, let's look at the game's economy.

Firstly, Brian has a health bar, a stamina bar and access to exactly three weapons over the course of the game - a baseball bat, a pistol and an assault rifle. OK, you technically have a fourth if you count the Molotov cocktail which can be crafted from a horrible menu system. I found enough supplies to craft two of them. I determined that there are 64 bullets available for the handgun across the entire game and 100 bullets for the assault rifle. Killing a zombie requires either three bullets from your pistol, four bullets from your rifle or three hits with the bat. You can swing your bat 20 times on a single stamina meter and there are three MREs in the game to partially refill your stamina. Stamina also drains permanently if you run.

This means, if you nail every single shot and every bat swing, while never running, you can kill 46 zombies with your firearms and 12 zombies with the bat, making that 58 enemies. Add another eight zombies or so if you count the Molotov cocktail. There are roughly three to four times that many zombies total in this game. Why does this matter? Well, in certain circumstances, if you waste even one bullet, you can wind up in an unwinnable situation.

After leaving the pharmacy, the game asks you to lockpick this police car - the second of three total lock picking mini-games in the game. Problem is, the game does not pause while picking the lock but no indication is given that you're being attacked so, when you finish this mini-game, the camera pulls out and you instantly die, no matter what. Even worse, the game usually soft-locks on the 'You Dead' screen forcing you to quit the game entirely and restart it. Just be careful not to spam through the Unity logo and start a new game by accident! To finish this mini-game, you need to kill each zombie in the area - which means you need enough bullets and bat swings to eliminate them all. If you reached this point without the required ammo, you won't be able to do it.

Oh, and that's not even touching on the Ellie, er, Eva problem - halfway through the game, you encounter her in the library and she begins to follow you. If Eva comes within spitting distance of a zombie, she enters a crouch and will remain there until all zombies are dispatched. With the limited number of enemies you can kill, this becomes a real problem as it can leave you without enough ammo to finish the game if she crouches at the wrong spot. You'll wind up snaking along the outside of the city and, once she crouches, hope that you can make it to the next loading screen before she dies.

What makes this all the more hilarious is the structure. Objectives are laid out in a linear fashion on this U-shaped boulevard. You are always locked into specific sections of this street until you complete each objective, so there's no opportunity for exploration. From the moment you leave the hospital, the game will present exactly 15 objectives before you complete it, just variations on entering an area, searching for items and leaving.

So yeah, what else can I say? The products produced by West Connection Limited are the eShop equivalent of browser pop-up packed with malware and it's disappointing that Nintendo even allows such a product onto their shop.

This also got me thinking about smaller projects in general. I mean, check out the Unity-based projects created by students at a local university above - they feature clever, interesting ideas with functional mechanics and an original visual design. These are games made by students still learning about games and they absolutely wipe the floor with anything West Connection Limited has ever produced.

Of course, we're not the only ones to have put this game through its paces - our colleagues at Eurogamer have already done so - and attempts to get comment on the game from both Nintendo and Sony were attempted, but so far, neither firm has replied.

Testing The Last Hope has been both cathartic yet also eye opening. I'd mostly ignored the shovelware-infested digital storefronts and assumed many of them were innocuous, but when you see something like this it really pulls back the curtain on the depravity festering within certain corners of the industry. The Last Hope is designed to take your money. There is no game here - this is effectively a scam. We all knew this from the trailer, but the fact that the actual game is so much less than even that awful trailer is genuinely shocking. Next time you find yourself looking at something like a Redfall or Destruction AllStars and thinking "Gee, these are bad games", I want you to step back, take a deep breath and remember The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survivor.