Last Flag Review: Hunger Games Goes on CTF Mode

Last Flag is a new competitive online game where you capture the enemy flag while defending your own before the timer runs out. It offers more than the typical CTF (capture the flag) modes you’ve seen in titles like Halo or Team Fortress 2.

More interestingly, this traditional children’s outdoor game is reimagined, quite literally, by the Imagine Dragons frontman and his brother. Both Dan and Mac Reynolds lead the creative direction and production of the game under the indie label Night Street Games.

A Game Show that Katniss Everdeen Secretly Wishes For

Last Flag takes a unique angle in setting up its CTF premise, making it both memorable and enjoyable. It’s set in a 1970s TV show, and all the designs support this theme, from characters and animations to environmental assets. Since it’s framed as a TV show, the playable heroes are called “contestants,” and from what I’ve seen, they fully embrace the showbiz energy.

Each character has both a real name and a stage name. For example, ex-idol Shin Soo-Jin is known as Knives, legendary stuntman Zhao Yuhang goes by Skyfire, and an ordinary citizen, Peter Makinen, takes on the Lumberjack persona.

When an enemy is downed, you can perform a finishing move to send them back to their base instantly. But finishing moves in a competitive setting aren’t what make this unique. Because it’s presented as a televised game show, these “fatalities” are exaggerated and absurd for entertainment, like sharks eating a downed contestant or a giant boxing glove punching them cartoon-style. There are plenty of finishers to unlock, and they aren’t locked behind paywalls.

The game’s assets further reinforce the 70s theme. Retro billboards and banners for fictional ads add immersion, while the host occasionally appears to comment on the match. There are also cashbots roaming the map, which you can destroy to earn in-game currency shared with your team and used to upgrade abilities mid-match.

There’s a lot to like about Last Flag’s creative direction. It feels similar to the entertainment-driven survival concept of The Hunger Games, though I’m pretty sure Katniss would prefer volunteering for this version instead.

Last Flag Tries to Solve CTF’s Biggest Problems

For those familiar with CTF, both in real life and in games, there’s a common issue: teams tend to favor defense. Attacking is risky, and once attackers are eliminated, the defending team can easily shift into offense against weakened opponents.

Last Flag attempts to address this through its prep phase and map design.

At the start of each match, one player per team is responsible for hiding the flag, either voluntarily or by random assignment. From there, you can hide it in plain sight or go full paranoia mode and stash it somewhere nearly impossible to find.

If you’re not hiding the flag, the prep phase lets you hunt cashbots for early upgrades. Once the phase ends, the hunt begins.

The two available maps are large but not bloated like High Guard. They’re well-designed for 5v5 gameplay, with enough tunnels, routes, and verticality to make both hiding and finding flags feel challenging.

I’ve seen flags hidden in plain sight like they’re not even trying, but I’ve also seen others placed on unreachable cliffs or deep within branching caves.

There’s definitely room for creativity here, and more importantly, it changes how both offense and defense are approached. Since flag locations aren’t fixed, both teams are forced to advance.

Then there’s the issue of incentivizing movement.

Searching a large map for a single hidden flag could easily become frustrating. To address this, Last Flag introduces three radar towers on each map. Essentially a domination mechanic, but these towers reshape how CTF is played.

The radar towers serve multiple purposes:

• Healing and recovery points
• Fast travel after respawning
• Locating the general direction of the enemy flag

Because they act as respawn points, securing them gives a strong advantage and makes death less punishing for highly-offensive teams.

The towers also scan for the enemy flag. So, how the map works is that it is divided into grid sections, and over time, the radar highlights which areas contain the flag.

With these towers in play, I’ve seen teams either aggressively fight to control all three or constantly reclaim towers upon losing them. This naturally leads to encounters which makes combat and team synergy more relevant in a CTF setting.

You don’t win instantly after you captured a flag. You still need to return it physically to your base and hold it briefly to secure the capture.

While carrying the flag, you can’t use abilities. This is where the game feels most intense. At your weakest, you become the focus of all five enemies. As you jump from cliffs and vault between roofs, you watch your teammates blasting all their flashy moves to protect you.

Roadie’s ultimate turns the battlefield into a stage, with booming soundwaves acting as an AoE attack. Lumberjack, wielding massive axes, launches enemies into the air with a cartoonish “Slam” effect.

Matches last around 20 minutes, with an overtime phase that reveals both flags and reduces capture time to five seconds. The game just wants you to rush in and experience the brutality of this tv game show.

But capturing the flag isn’t the only way to win.

Teams also earn points through eliminations, capturing radar towers, those standard competitive objectives. Even if no flags are captured, the match still resolves based on overall performance.

Conflict Between Capturing Flag or Pursuing Combat

When it comes to hero balance and the overall meta, it’s still too early to draw firm conclusions. I’ve only played a few coordinated pre-launch sessions, with the rest being bot-filled matches. This will need reevaluation once the player base grows.

For now, Last Flag’s roster is a small number of 9 contestants. You’ve got your usual mix ranging from tanky melee characters, ranged damage dealers, and stealth-focused options. Gunplay itself is decent but not particularly outstanding compared to top-tier shooters. Abilities are flashy and fun, but some feel underpowered. For example, Knives’ portal ability seems too situational to function effectively as an ultimate.

There’s also the concern that the game seems to split into two identities: focusing purely on capturing the flag or progressing through combat encounters.

“We think of our game as capture the flag first, shooter second…”
— Dan Reynolds, Co-founder of Night Street Games

In one of my matches, while we were focused on securing towers, the enemy team managed to rush our base and capture the flag in under a minute. That’s possible because the game gives you strong proximity cues in both visual and audio when you’re near a flag (kind of like a spider sense).

In the end, it doesn’t really matter if you hide the flag well, it’s more important to place it where it can delay enemies from reaching it and escaping back to their base.

So while the map design supports both strategy and exploration, some of the systems around it feel like they undercut each other. Towers matter to some extent until suddenly the enemy team coordinates a direct rush to your base.

Final Verdict: Good

Last Flag has a fresh take on Capture the Flag, with strong map design and creative strategy during prep and extraction.

But right now, the systems don’t always support each other, and that creates an identity problem that could hurt its long-term appeal. It’s not about whether the game works… because it does.

But after seeing the fate of so many new competitive games, it raises real concerns about whether Last Flag can hold attention in the long run. Especially since the game comes with a price tag and a very limited content, against free-to-play games that could offer more.

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