The Aptly Named "Last Man Standing" Is A Free-To-Play Battle Royale Game

Sergey Titov and his company Free Reign Entertainment are back and they're attempting to ride a new hype train. You see, survival games are out. They're yesterday's news. Boring. Sad. What's really hitting it big these days is battle royale games. With this knowledge in hand, Titov has done what he does best; repurposed the same engine he's used for some four or five games now to make a battle royale game, which is aptly named "Last Man Standing." The game is set in the Shattered Skies universe, but I'm not sure that anyone would know that if you didn't explicitly tell them, seeing as there is nothing about the Shattered Skies universe that stands out as being distinctly Shattered Skies.

Last Man Standing spent some time in paid Early Access, at which time it received a score of "Mostly Negative" for about all of the same problems that Titov's other games have had: it didn't play well, it had the same bugs that every other game that he's been involved in has had, and no one was playing it. Realizing this, Free Reign made one key change to Last Man Standing: as of its release, it is now free-to-play.

To draw players in, Free Reign is also offering "real cash prizes" of "at least $10,000 in monthly cash payments." Who gets this money, you ask? The Top 10 players each month.

Despite the free-to-play business model and real cash prizes, I don't have a lot of hope for Free Reign's latest game. The company has a bad habit of not providing games with proper content updates and subsequently abandoning them when the player population drops off. The most recent case of this behavior appears to be Shattered Skies, now known as "Shattered Skies: Prologue" with the release of Last Man Standing, which has countless recent reviews stating that they can't connect to the servers whatsoever. This is an exceptionally bizarre turn of events, given that the game was actively put on sale for $3.99 to coincide with the release of Last Man Standing, but I still think that the most shocking revelation here is learning that Shattered Skies had enough of a story to justify adding "Prologue" to the title.

Last Man Standing may be free-to-play, whereas its key competitors, H1Z1: King of the Kill and PLAYERUNKNOWN's Battlegrounds, are not, but something tells me that this one won't be the last man standing.