Left Alive

*Left Alive* is the twentieth episode of Just Bad Games, released on July 23, 2020.

## Transcript

**Shane**: *Left Alive* is a stealth urban survival third-person shooter game designed by Ilinx, published by Square Enix, and released on PC and PlayStation 4 in 2019.

**Adam**: This game is the latest installment of the *Front Mission* franchise, a series of very popular mech combat and roleplaying strategy titles from Japan.

**Shane**: *Front Mission* first appeared way back on the Super Famicom in 1995, and while many of the titles have remained Japanese exclusives, some entries have seen releases worldwide, including *Front Mission 3* on PlayStation, the first in the series to come to North America.

**Adam**: The important thing to remember is that *Front Mission* has largely been a series about controlling large mechanized walking robots called "Wanzers" in a strategic gameplay environment. So, what did *Left Alive* bring to the table?

**Shane**: Well, get ready, because it's time to check the pulse on *Left Alive*.

**Adam**: The game begins with some good old worldbuilding. In this universe, the world's the same as ours, but different. Countries have been renamed and their borders redrawn. The year is 2127, and the Republic of Garmoniya has invaded the Republic of Ruthenia through the small border city of Novo Slava.

**Shane**: Who? What? Why? I guess it's not very important, because instead of explaining a little further, we're plopped right into the combat boots of Mikhail in the warzone of Novo Slava.

**Adam**: Mikhail's name is about the most you learn about him beyond the fact that he's a Wanzer pilot in the Ruthenian army. Mikhail's not the most ambitious soldier. He only joined the army to play with Wanzers.

**Mikhail**: I only enlisted so I could pilot a Wanzer!

**Adam**: Our reluctant hero sets out to see if anyone from his platoon is left alive.

**Shane**: W-wait, on foot?

**Adam**: Oh, how did you expect him to get around? Using some large, bipedal, armored death machine?

**Shane**: Actually, yes. Remember when we said the *Front Mission* series is focused on Wanzer combat? Well, *Left Alive* is very different. We start the game with a Wanzer pilot who doesn't have a freakin' Wanzer. What happened here?

**Adam**: We don't know, but on paper, the production of *Left Alive* sounded solid. To direct, they brought on Toshifumi Nabeshima from the *Armored Core* series, and the development company, Ilinx, had worked on the *Gundam Breaker* games. These titles revolved around controlling mechs. The creative team was off to a promising start.

**Shane**: But it seems nothing during production went as planned. By the time the final product came out, we got this weird, stirred-up mix of ideas that is *Left Alive*.

**Adam**: And it's a mess to play. This first mission is trying to teach the player how to survive stealthily in a warzone, but unlike other games that teach you dynamically through actions in the game world, *Left Alive* takes a different approach.

**Shane**: Massive walls of instructions. Look at it all! It's like you need a college textbook to play this game.

**Adam**: And it goes on and on. Anyone else having fun yet?

**Shane**: Between encyclopedias of instructions, you get to actually experience the game, and this is- well, where the legs really start to come off the Wanzer.

**Adam**: The first prominent gameplay mechanic of *Left Alive* is stealth.

**Shane**: Other stealth-based games give the player easy to understand tools to strategically sneak around enemies, like *Metal Gear Solid's* vision cones. In *Left Alive*, we get a clumsy red line that often doesn't correctly show where the enemy is or line up properly with the screen.

**Adam**: While you're doing your best to sneak around, it feels like a guessing game as to what will and won't keep you from being spotted. If you do manage to sneak up on an enemy, there's nothing particularly special you can do to them because the developers didn't include stealth takedowns in this stealth-focused video game.

**Shane**: Enemies are sorta zoned out most of the time. They'll just stare at you and do nothing, except when they do something. It's hard to predict their next move, and it makes it impossible to rely on any tactic to go undetected.

**Adam**: And just for an added layer of stupid, the game regularly forces you into combat situations with no way out but to fight.

**Shane**: Eventually, you'll stealth your way over to Mikhail's superior officer Alexander. Doesn't look like he's doing so good.

**Adam**: But suddenly, the enemy is upon us. Mikhail must defend his position, leading to our very first Wanzer combat sequence.

**Shane**: Finally. The moment we've all been waiting for. We get to control a towering metal goliath... and it's broken.

**Adam**: The first giant mech you control in the game has only one functional arm, and nothing else. You can't even walk! Let's call it like it is: this is a standard, dumb turret sequence.

**Shane**: This long-running strategic mech combat series is really forgetting about the whole mech combat part. The controls are clunky, slow, and very weighted. But hey, this is a broken mech, after all. Let's not base everything off this one experience alone.

**Adam**: After taking care of the army of soldiers, who apparently had no possible way to take down a broken mech with one working appendage, we meet Mikhail's nemesis for the game: Ivan.

**Shane**: Ivan makes tons of baseball references.

**Ivan**: You like baseball? I can't get enough of it. Three strikes and you're out.

**Shane**: No, for real, he's in love with the sport and mentions it every chance he gets. We're gonna go ahead and call him "Captain Baseball" from here on out.

**Adam**: This interaction is where we're introduced to a prominent story device in *Left Alive*: branching story dialogue options. The options are vague, and often don't result in the outcome you may expect. Really though, you can pick anything. Your choices don't really matter.

**Shane**: Depending on what dialogue options you choose with Alexander, you might give him a first aid kit for his wounds, or he might ask you to pay off his unpaid burger bill.

**Alexander**: That's a bill from Paradise Burger.

**Mikhail**: What?

**Alexander**: I'm counting on you to clear my good name.

**Adam**: Dude's about to bite the dust, and he's worried about his tab at Mickey D's.

**Alexander**: I'm no dine-and-dasher.

**Adam**: No you aren't, Alexander. No you aren't.

**Shane**: When you're confronted by Captain Baseball, your choices will literally mean life or death. You unknowingly decide whether or not he shoots Alexander.

**Adam**: You might be thinking "well, hey. Your dialogue choices seem incredibly important. You have direct control over outcomes that could turn the tide of the entire story".

**Shane**: Wrong. Whether Alexander gets a health pack, whether he gets shot, whether you agree to pay off his McRib, the scene ends the exact same way. They didn't even include Alexander's character model in the final shot so it would fit in regardless of what you choose.

**Adam**: Even if Alexander lives, you'll never hear from his character again in the campaign. The game will play out in the exact same way regardless. It's merely the illusion of choice.

**Shane**: After this scene, we expect Mikhail to get back on his feet and start venturing through the city, but-

**Adam**: We change characters. Now, we're playing a police officer named Olga.

**Shane**: Olga's on an investigation to find a child trafficker in the slums of Novo Slava. She discovers a runaway girl named Yulia.

**Olga**: Hey, look. Meow!

**Shane**: But their deep conversation is cut short by the enemy invasion and subsequent war. Surprise, Olga is an ex-soldier. She jumps right into the action without missing a beat.

**Adam**: Every stealth issue we had with Mikhail is replicated with Olga, but now there are flying drones that can see you and sound an alarm, and they can instantly transform into murder unicycles that drive around the map and shoot at you.

**Shane**: So you might find yourself thinking "you know what? I'm done with stealth. I'm going hardcore combat mode now". Well, don't. That's a mistake.

**Adam**: Weapon ammo is in very limited supply, and your enemies rarely drop anything when you kill them, so they're really no help.

**Shane**: You might think you could at least pick up their guns when you take them out, but apparently, they're not for you, because dropped firearms mysteriously vaporize.

**Adam**: But let's say you do manage to stock up on ammo from item boxes throughout the level. You're just gonna waste it all on horribly overpowered bullet sponge enemies.

**Shane**: Seriously, they are not easy to take down. A perfect headshot- even two perfect headshots- will not work if you play this on the standard difficulty level. You'll waste whole rounds of ammunition to defend yourself, and then that's when they sic the Wanzers on you.

**Adam**: When they aren't gunning you down, the Wanzers litter the game map as huge static props.

**Shane**: That Wanzer seems to be uh, floating off the ground. Huh.

**Adam**: Careful, though. Get a bit too close, and bam.

*(Olga dies for no reason)*

**Shane**: Sneaking by Wanzers in a sneaking game somehow punishable by insta-kill. Awesome!

**Adam**: Oh, if you thought taking care of yourself was rough, folks, we've got escort missions.

**Shane**: That's right. Civilian survivors you're supposed to protect and lead to shelter in a warzone against tons of enemy units with overpowered weapons and abilities. Now we have to use our limited supplies to protect these worthless NPCs.

**Civilian**: What are you doing, just wandering around like an idiot? You need to get me somewhere safe! Now!

*(Olga shoots at the NPC)*

**Adam**: So weapon ammo is hard to find and sneaking is barely functional. But don't fear, cause you still have close-quarters weapons. These don't require ammo at all, like the stun gun.

*(The stun gun fails to stun the enemy)*

Well, that didn't go well. But there's no avoiding the crowbar.

**Koshka**: Close-quarters weapon failure. I advise discarding it.

**Shane**: The f\*\*k does that mean?

**Adam**: That's right, the game gives you a few good takedowns, but then that's it. The crowbar's damaged and needs to be thrown away. You can keep using it if you want, but anyone you knock down is getting right back up.

**Shane**: How does a solid piece of metal fail? That makes no sense! Oh no, you know what? It's my mistake. I must've missed the part of the game where crowbars are made with papier-mâché.

**Adam**: But know what we didn't miss? These in-game ads for other video games.

**Shane**: *World of Tanks*. These ads are everywhere!

**Adam**: On the walls, on the floors, even on your backpack.

**Shane**: These are from a free *World of Tanks* DLC bundle. And hey, remember the crowbar we were talking about? Yeah, guess what. That's actually **the** *Half-Life* crowbar, Gordon Freeman's weapon of choice. That's Steam-exclusive DLC right there.

**Adam**: These automatically installed with our game when we first booted it up. You can turn them off, and you'll get empty walls with no ads and a random metal pipe instead of the crowbar, but hey! It's free, instant-installed DLC adding compelling content to the game, so we'll just leave them on.

**Shane**: Speaking of other games dripping into this one, we gotta talk about *Metal Gear Solid* again. We mentioned the title earlier because its stealth-action gameplay is far superior than *Left Alive's*, but comparing visuals, especially for the later *Metal Gear Solid* games, they're strikingly similar.

**Adam**: Well, that's not surprising. One of the lead artists in this game is none other than Yoji Shinkawa, a key creative force behind the visual style of the *Metal Gear Solid* series. Heck, even the *Left Alive* box art looks like it's doing its best *Metal Gear Solid* impression.

**Shane**: With all the refinements, all the painstaking design that made *Metal Gear Solid* the series that it is is completely absent with *Left Alive*. And wait, this is part of the *Front Mission* series, right?

**Adam**: Yes it is.

**Shane**: So why haven't we got more hands-on Wanzer gameplay? I've been shot at by them more than enough, and at this point, I've just kind of shifted a single mech arm around.

**Adam**: Well, you're in luck! The game takes us back to Mikhail, who is still routing Novo Slava. After a very long on-foot sequence, he finally comes across a Wanzer.

**Shane**: Surrounded by a giant platoon of soldiers!

**Adam**: Jeez. Okay. I think we need to intelligently implement the best sneaking abilities while systematically and strategically taking out every enemy soldier to secure the Wanzer from our tactical enemies.

**Shane**: Right.

*(Mikhail cartwheels right to the Wanzer)*

**Shane and Adam**: That was super effective!

**Shane**: We jump into the Wanzer. Doesn't appear to have any security features or even a set of keys needed to start the thing, and-

*(Game over, Adam grunts)*

If you thought controlling a broken Wanzer's arm was a pain, controlling the whole thing is way worse. It's even more clunky and incredibly unresponsive. It feels like you lack the control and precision to effectively attack or even walk around.

**Adam**: And the area where you can move this Wanzer? It's severely limited by giant invincible walls everywhere.

**Shane**: These massive war-defining weapons of destruction that were so hyped up earlier in the cutscenes are a complete letdown.

**Adam**: Let's lose the mech and jump back to Olga. Maybe something more interesting's happening with her.

**Shane**: Well, no. Her running around has led her to the same city map that Mikhail is in.

**Koshka**: Olga, there is a Ruthenian soldier nearby being pursued by the enemy.

**Olga**: A survivor?

**Adam**: Olga's directed by her communications AI, AKA dumb story pushy forward device, to go to the aid of our good friend Mikhail, who's protecting a civilian.

**Shane**: Olga finds them, only to discover that Mikhail is there watching over the little girl from the slums earlier, Yulia.

**Olga**: Meow!

**Adam**: Oh, cool! Our two main characters are finally going to have a back and forth, explaining what's going on with this girl and expand on the world's events and-

**Mikhail**: I'll take whatever help I can get. Beggars can't be choosers.

**Olga**: That girl... I saw her in the slums. Is she alive?

**Mikhail**: Yeah!

**Adam**: We're not gonna get any of that, are we?

**Shane**: Nope! Mikhail just found the girl randomly offscreen while we were playing as Olga, and he also just so happened to find himself at the top of this building.

**Adam**: Olga's AI informs her that a bunch of soldiers are closing in on their position, and that she should prepare to fight them off.

**Shane**: Now folks, let us be very direct with you: this part of the game **sucks.**

**Adam**: Until this point, we've shown ya how the combat gameplay's unfair and stealth doesn't work. But, you could always do that fun "roll away" move that we showed you earlier to avoid most fights. It works all over. Even Olga can do it.

**Shane and Adam**: Lookin' good!

**Shane**: But not here. You can't avoid this fight. There's only one way to get past this part of the game: eliminate everyone. Great for a stealth experience. Anyway, while we gear up to get ready to rumble, let's take you through one of this game's biggest faults.

**Adam**: *Left Alive's* horrendous item management and crafting system.

**Shane**: Every character you play as in *Left Alive* can carry a small number of items on their person. These items can be used to benefit you, like health packs, flashbangs, or enemy sensors that display the soldiers' locations.

**Adam**: Other items you can find are weapons. You'll find them in boxes or storage crates. You can even find random items that have no functional use at first, but can be combined to craft things like Molotov cocktails, auto turrets, tripwire explosives, and other traps.

**Shane**: You can also craft hemostatic patches to stop bleeding.

**Adam**: Yeah, because if you get hurt, you'll bleed. And if you don't stop the bleeding, your health depletes to almost zero, leaving you close to death. Nice feature.

**Shane**: Because of this, your limited storage space gets taken up immediately with life-saving bandages and necessary weapons like shotguns and assault rifles. That's not even mentioning the body armor you might pick up. You'll have so little space that you'll routinely pass over items because you don't have room.

**Adam**: To try to help the game's inventory problems, you can find backpacks in the game world. These backpacks expand your storage, but the catch is you have to find them.

**Shane**: We got this far with Olga, and she hadn't found a backpack yet. Despite being underequipped, we still tried to fight, but it didn't go well.

**Adam**: After we reload, we search around the building for supplies before the fight starts, and guess what we find? A backpack. Better late than never. So, did this make things easier?

**Shane**: Not really. It's a 1 vs. 50 and there isn't enough ammo in the world to take them out one by one, so the best chance against these oncoming soldiers is laying down traps. Traps that need to be crafted with items- items we didn't have space for on our journeys, since we didn't find a backpack until just now. Thanks, game.

**Adam**: If you do have enough items to craft wire traps and electrical wire, those alone aren't gonna be enough in battle. They simply serve to stun enemies.

**Shane**: You can also craft projectiles, like exploding cans and Molotov cocktails, but you'll have to throw multiple projectiles at one enemy just to take them down.

*(Caption: We realized upon editing, that we lit our friends on fire here. They didn't seem to notice or care...)*

**Adam**: As if this wasn't difficult enough, it's not just soldiers you need to worry about.

**Shane**: Meet the painfully ever-present killer electric soccer balls.

**Adam**: These stupid things speed on over and whack you in the head, and then they explode with lightning and electrocute you. Great.

**Shane**: All of this left us wondering if we were the only ones who had trouble with this game, and it would appear the answer is no.

**Adam**: We did a little research and found out that *Left Alive* got an update just a month after release. This update patched in a "casual" difficulty mode, a mode created because countless gamers complained about how broken the game was. That mode brought in headshot kills and made enemies significantly easier to take out.

**Shane**: Well, to an extent, the hit detection is still so off in this game that perfectly-aimed shots will miss half the time. Hey! I got you. No fair!

**Adam**: We want to give the developers of *Left Alive* every chance to show us they could correct this disaster, so we replayed and finished this game on casual mode. It's still not fair, but it's the best this game can offer.

**Shane**: Back to Mikhail, Olga, and Yulia.

**Mikhail**: Do all cops have a hero complex, or is it just you? Get your head on straight!

**Olga**: This conversation is a waste of time.

**Shane**: Mikhail and Olga get into an argument, so he storms off and leaves Olga to watch over the girl.

**Adam**: Then the girl runs away from Olga, leaving her all alone again. But, not for long. While going through the sewer, Olga witnesses a murder. The guy with the gun here is Ruslan. He's got main villain vibes. I've got a feeling we'll be hearing more from him later.

**Shane**: After Ruslan leaves, a new character named Leonid introduces himself to Olga.

**Leonid**: Don't move.

**Shane**: He looks friendly. When he finds out Ruslan was nearby, he gives chase, and Olga heads off towards the harbor.

**Adam**: It's okay if you feel lost with the story. So did we. The game keeps throwing names at us with no context or sufficient background.

**Patrick**: The name's Patrick Lemaire.

**Olga**: Lieutenant Borodin.

**Leonid**: Sophie?

**Patrick**: Vladimir Bunin.

**Ruslan**: Rovnoy.

**Guard**: Zvargolin.

**Patrick**: Vavdra.

**Olga**: Meow!

**Shane**: The whole game goes on like this, a string of proper names being hurled at you but with no time invested in proper explanation.

**Leonid**: I don't feel like explaining it to you.

**Shane**: As a backup, there are these archives you can pick up that you can also easily miss, but there's still no replacement for a competent story. Even they don't fill in all the blanks.

**Adam**: Some of these names and references do point to other entries in the *Front Mission* series, but remember: many were not officially localized outside of Japan. So, we could really use a little more exposition here.

**Shane**: So what's next, you might ask? Well now, we're in control of Leonid, the guy with the gun here.

**Adam**: Old Leo is an escaped convict who apparently was wrongly imprisoned for assassinating Ruslan. This guy, from earlier over here who's not dead.

**Olga**: That can't be him! He's dead!

**Adam**: Leo was supposedly executed for his crimes, but he's also not dead.

**Shane**: Now, Leo is on the hunt for Ruslan to find answers to his questions. Like "why was he in prison for killing a man that wasn't actually dead"?

**Adam**: It should come as no surprise that Leo controls like the last two characters. The only thing that changes between the different antagonists is their inventory, which sucks, since you'll always forget which character has items you've already collected, and each character will need to find bigger and better backpacks on their own as they progress.

**Shane**: Building up an inventory plus item management times three. Such an awful idea.

**Adam**: And surprise surprise, Leo's just running around on foot like all the rest. How is this a *Front Mission* game? How are we spending so little time in Wanzers, and like 90% of our time as random peons running around this desolate city?

**Shane**: To answer that, let us take a trip back in time to 2010 with the release of the last *Front Mission* game.

**Adam**: Like we said, *Front Mission* is primarily a series of strategy games using giant mechs, but the latest game before *Left Alive* changed all of that. Produced by an American development studio, a first for the series, *Front Mission Evolved* skipped all that pesky strategy stuff and introduced on-foot third-person shooter gameplay alongside the use of Wanzers.

**Shane**: But Wanzer combat was the focus, and comprised the majority of gameplay. And making use of these hulking metal tanks was way more responsive and consistent than anything you'll find in *Left Alive*.

**Adam**: But *Front Mission Evolved* was far from a perfect game and wasn't well received critically or commercially.

**Shane**: Longtime fans of *Front Mission* were less than impressed with *Evolved's* attempt to remove strategy gameplay from their beloved series.

**Adam**: You would think that when *Left Alive* went into production, they would've learned from the mistakes of the last game.

**Shane**: Yeah, I guess they put the same amount of effort to those concerns as they did into the visual quality of this game.

**Adam**: That is to say *Left Alive* is a feast of visual oddities and glitches.

**Shane**: Take these flaming boxes, for example. They look fine enough on first glance, but look closer.

**Adam**: The box isn't burnt, charred, blackened, barbequed, nothing. They didn't manipulate the texture. They just took a wooden box, farted some fire on top of it, and walked away.

**Shane**: Same with this fiery window next to it. The glass is perfectly intact, yet there are flames just oozing through. They didn't even bother adding basic flame crackling sound effects.

**Adam**: Let's move past fire for a moment and onto car windows. This vehicle here? No windows. Same here, and here, and- do you see a pattern? For every car in this game that has the proper window texture, there's one out there that looks like this.

**Shane**: And yeah, okay. Maybe in the future, there are cars that don't need windows for some reason, but why then do they have windshield wipers? Why? To wipe the rain from the metal you can't see out of?

**Adam**: Maybe obstructed vision explains why these tire tracks head straight through a solid wall. What kind of vehicle did that?

**Money Ghost**: Ghost truck! Wooo!

**Shane**: Oh, and if we're talking about visual imperfections, we have to talk about character animations. The enemies specifically are the crème de la crème of glitchy designs.

**Adam**: Like how every time you kill a soldier, they throw their weapon gingerly straight in the air. No kidding. Literally every single time.

**Shane**: Or how they make these insane vertical jumps with their armored, powered suits, but the jumps don't always go smoothly. I- I think he might be stuck.

**Adam**: It's not all bad. That guy seems to be having a good time.

**Shane**: Jumping isn't the only problem enemy models have. After you take them out, sometimes their lifeless bodies do this:

*(Dead soldier's corps wiggles around)*

**Adam**: The only thing worse than watching these dead bodies glitch and squirm on the ground is trying to follow the game's disjointed and half-hearted plot.

**Shane**: Okay, so what happens next? Uh, let's see- Leonid confronts Ruslan and he shoots him in the heart and kills him for realsies this time.

**Adam**: Then we get an exposition dump from an undercover agent or whatever about a bloodborne pathogen that is the real reason for the war. When asked what this has to do with anything, he replies-

**Patrick**: Who knows? I never said I had all the details.

**Adam**: Thanks. That's very helpful.

**Shane**: All of our characters end up at the same harbor, each of them caught up in a plot about stolen Wanzer blueprints that seems to be boldly mimicking a little series we may have spoken about. But it falls flat on its face. Then everyone escapes to a town called New Town- how original- to catch transport away from this awful game.

**Adam**: In New Town, Olga is searching for Yulia, and comes across Ruslan. Gasp, he's still alive? Olga doesn't find this weird because she didn't know he was dead.

**Olga**: That can't be him! He's dead!

**Adam**: Well, I mean, she knew he was dead from before, but didn't know he was dead a second time. I think I'm getting a migraine.

**Shane**: Anyway, after taking out a Wanzer on foot, an act no other soldier in the game seems to be able to do- and a whole unit of soldiers on top of that- Olga finds Yulia, and then we get a twist. Wondering why a little girl is holding a knife to her neck? We were too.

**Adam**: Turns out an evil organization infected her with a mutated deadly pathogen, and they plan to use her blood to kill a bunch of people.

**Shane**: Okay Yulia, don't do anything rash. Let's make sure we get this right.

*(Olga hugs Yulia, then rewind back to the dialogue options)*

Okay Yulia, don't do anything rash. Let's make sure we get this right.

*(Yulia slits her throat)*

**Adam**: oh my G- did that just happen?

**Shane**: Yep! Yulia's life literally depends on you knowing which of these obscure dialogue options to choose. Say the wrong thing, and the game developers end a little girl's life.

**Adam**: And as horrific as that was, It doesn't actually matter. Just like with Alexander in the first level-

**Alexander**: I'm no dine-and-dasher.

**Adam**: -You'll never hear from or see Yulia again through the rest of the game regardless of what you choose.

**Shane**: So, Olga's story is done, I guess. How is Mikhail doing?

**Adam**: Well, he got into an epic Wanzer fight with Captain Baseball, who is-

**Ivan**: It's the bottom of the ninth!

**Adam**: Yeah, he's still talking about baseball. We didn't wanna fight him, and almost thought we could get out of it-

**Ivan**: I'm not going home until I kill you. Bases are loaded and you're up to bat, Mikhail. Show me what you're made of.

**Adam**: Swing and a miss. Swing and a miss.

**Shane**: Anyway, the fight is boring and it doesn't last very long. Captain Baseball talks a big game, but is pretty lame. I mean, he can't even pilot his Wanzer properly. He gets stuck on the side of a building while at the same time destroying himself with his own weapon splash damage.

**Adam**: At the end of the fight, Mikhail has the meaningless choice to either murder or not murder Captain Baseball.

**Mikhail**: Game. (shoots as screen cuts to black)

**Shane**: And the crowd goes wild.

**Adam**: So Mikhail's story is done is well. Then we join Leonid on his journey to the top of the office tower to meet a helicopter. But, Ruslan shows up.

**Shane**: He- wait- what?

**Adam**: Yeah, he was pretty shocked too since he'd been locked up for killing him and then killed him for real a little while ago.

**Shane**: How is this possible?

**Adam**: I don't know. This turns into a boss fight with an oddly-superpowered Ruslan. What's even going on? Like, nobody could survive all this. Is he a robot or something?

**Shane**: He's a robot or something.

**Adam**: WHAT? How is he a robot? Are there other robots? Who's making robots? Did the story of *Left Alive* even mention that intelligent robots exist?

**Shane**: No? Maybe?

**Patrick**: Who knows?

**Adam**: So Leonid shoots Mr. Roboto out the window, heads to the roof, and-

**Shane**: Oh look. The robot is still alive. And now it's in a Wanzer. And Leonid, of course, doesn't have a Wanzer, so now he needs to run around avoiding mech attacks and try desperately to use some laser-guided missile attack to destroy the thing.

**Adam**: Might've been nice to end this *Front Mission* entry with an epic final one-on-one Wanzer battle?

**Shane**: Nice things were not left alive while developing this thing.

**Adam**: After a stupidly long end boss fight, Mr. Roboto is dead. Maybe. Probably not. I don't care!

**Shane**: Game over.

**Adam**: *Left Alive's* core gameplay is awful. That much can't be denied. From shallow attempted stealth to its horrible giant robot sequences. It's filled with undercooked gameplay ideas, silly glitches and visual inconsistencies that completely strip the game of fun.

**Shane**: If they were trying to copy *Metal Gear Solid*, which is almost undeniable at this point, the one thing they could've tried to get right is the story.

**Adam**: And sadly, the narrative is a clumsy mess. It starts confusing and only becomes worse as the plot plays out.

**Shane**: Who would've benefitted from a blood-based pathogen spreading?

**Adam**: What was so special about the stolen Wanzer plans?

**Shane**: What was this soldier so excited about?

**Adam**: None of these questions have answers. All we know about *Left Alive* is-

**Shane**: **IT'S JUST BAD.**