Last Kids on Earth and the Staff of Doom

My honest reaction walking into this one: low expectations, mild surprise on the way out. Staff of Doom is a top-down, semi-open-world hack-and-slash built around the Netflix animated series, and it wears its Diablo-lite DNA openly without pretending to have anywhere near that game's mechanical depth. You pick one of four characters - Jack (melee warrior), June (ranged fighter), Quint (mage-scientist with a useful healing ability), or Dirk (slow, hard-hitting tank) - and then you spend the next four to six hours clearing zombie-infested districts of Wakefield, hunting Staff fragments, and upgrading your loadout back at treehouse HQ. It is exactly that simple, by design. The crafting loop is the thing that kept me clicking longer than I expected. Blueprints are scattered through chests and awarded by story beats, and you can craft and upgrade weapons, armor sets, turrets for the treehouse, and even the monster ally summons - Rover, Biggun, Skaelka, and the sword-swinging Bardle. The vehicle Big Mama also gets upgrade paths, and there are timed driving challenges per district if you want a break from bashing skulls. None of these systems are deep - unlocking a new sword mostly means a different charge attack animation rather than a genuine playstyle shift - but the feedback loop of collect, craft, upgrade is rhythmically satisfying in a way that carries the short runtime. The co-op is where the game finds its actual identity. Up to four players share a couch, each locked to one of the four characters, and the combination of melee and ranged roles makes fights feel more interesting than they do solo. The tower defense segments - treehouse defense waves where you place turrets and hold off zombie assaults - are a decent palette cleanser, though the game only throws three of them at you total, and the turret upgrade tree you spend time building is largely irrelevant before you have finished all three. That is the pattern with Staff of Doom overall: ideas are introduced, lightly sketched, and then abandoned before they mature. On the narrative side, I came in hoping the writing would channel some of the show's humor. It does, occasionally. The voice cast from the Netflix series reprised their roles, and Jack's deadpan commentary lands a few genuine laughs. The story, told through comic-book panel cutscenes, is thin - villain Malondre remains a flat antagonist, the stakes never escalate, and the plot would generously qualify as filler if it appeared in the show. For RPG fans who care about whether choices matter and whether lore rewards a second look, there is nothing here. The worldbuilding is set dressing, not scaffolding. This is a game with a clear and honest target audience: kids who watch the show, ideally with a sibling or parent in tow. For that use case it largely succeeds - responsive controls, a bright colorful art style faithful to the source material, and forgiving difficulty. Adult players or anyone with a Minecraft Dungeons or Hades comparison in mind will find the combat loop exhausted well before the credits roll. The repetitive mission structure (go to location X, kill enemies, return) and the absence of online multiplayer are real friction points that a bigger budget would have addressed. Go in knowing what it is, and it delivers a decent afternoon.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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