This entry into the Last Stand series is a prequel of sorts and as such has a new story to tell. Who is at the centre of that story is up to you. You’ll create your character from the bottom up or you can select from a few presets if you can’t be bothered.

Custom creating your character though will allow you to play through the game how you want to. From handgun specialists to big beefy brawlers to smooth talker, there’s endless options.

Appearance
You won’t be playing dressups straight away but you’ll be able to determine the look of your character right at the start. Customising your characters appearance will allow for changes to:
- Gender
- Hair
- Skin
- Face
- Facial Hair

Vitals
Your characters vitals are the core set of stats that keep you alive. They include Health, Stamina and Nourishment and Sleep. Depending on which game mode you’re playing, you’ll have all or a few of these to worry about. Health and Stamina are present in both games and determine your character’s life and how active your character can be respectively.

Nourishment and Sleep are only available in the Survivor game mode, so you’ll need to make sure you eat and sleep. Not doing so will affect all of your skills gradually and may even kill you if you’re not careful.

Attributes & Skills
Each character in the game will have a set of attributes that will determine a number of factors throughout the game. They affect things such as your carry weight, health, melee damage, firearm accuracy and how much food and water you need. The base attributes are: Strength, Endurance, Intellect and Precision.

There are 14 Skills available, with each one falling under the influence of one of the base attributes. If the player has a high Strength for example, all of his/her Strength Skills will recieve bonuses. The Skills available are as follows:

Strength Skills
Blunt Weapons – Clubs, bats.
Blades – Knives, Axes and chainsaws

Precision Skills
Pistols – Covers automatics and revolvers
Long guns – Shotguns, Bolt Action Rifles
Automatics – SMG’s and Assault Rifles
Special Weapons – RPG’s etc
Traps – Ability setting traps

Intellect Skills
Explosives – Grenades, Molotovs etc
Security – Locks, keypads, computer systems
Searching – Effectiveness of searching
Speech – Helps in conversation
First Aid – Healing ability

Endurance Skills
Fitness- Reduces energy use.
Survival – Reduces the amounts of water and food used.

Levelling
As you progress through the game you’ll earn experience (XP) and work your way through levels. When you hit a level, you will be provided with skill points. There will be bonus skill points available to your most used skills, this is to replicate your character “getting better” at a task by repeating it.

You can choose to assign your skill points to the most used skills or put them into any other skill and not recieve the bonus.

That’s about the basics of it. I’ve been prototyping the leveling system and working my way through a huge number of levels to determine how many skill points should be handed out etc. What the level cap and how many points you’ll assign to Attributes to Skills isn’t quite finalised yet, but it’s getting there. Until next time!

- Con