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The Last Spartan
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About the game
The year is 404 BC, the last year of the war between Sparta and Athens, and your battalion is gone. You are the last hoplite standing, with a sword, a round shield and no way out, on a stretch of Greek coast where Athenian soldiers keep arriving from every side. There is no victory to win. The question is how long you last and how many you take with you.
The fighting is simple to learn and has real depth. Sword strikes cost a little stamina, the shield blocks blows from the front, and two heavier moves stun the enemies around you: a shield charge and a leap that ends in a ground pound. Stamina, the blue bar, refills when you stop attacking, and health, the red bar, only comes back while you rest at full stamina, so a good fight is a rhythm of pressing forward and backing off to breathe. Now and then a much larger soldier joins the crowd, and he takes many more hits to bring down.
Each battle takes place on a new isometric map of sand, grass, trees and water, generated from a random seed, with blocky pixel-art soldiers drawn by code. Michael Ferron made the game for js13kGames 2020, whose theme was "404": here, the year.
Playing it here
This is the original competition version, unchanged. Click Play and press Enter on the title screen to begin; the controls are listed under the battlefield. When you fall, the end screen shows how long you survived and how many enemies you defeated, next to your records, which are kept in this browser.
The game is violent in a cartoonish way: defeated soldiers break apart into blocky pieces, with a little pixel blood.
Controls
| Keyboard | Mouse | Action |
|---|---|---|
| W A S D | move | |
| J | left button | attack |
| K | right button | block with the shield |
| Space | jump | |
| K + J | both buttons | Spartan charge |
| Space + J | Space + left button | ground pound |
| P | pause | |
| Enter | start a new battle |
A few things worth knowing
Do not swing nonstop. An empty stamina bar leaves you unable to attack or block. Short bursts with pauses in between keep you dangerous.
Rest to heal. Health only regenerates once stamina is full and you have not acted for a moment, so step away from the crowd to recover.
Stun groups. The charge and the ground pound stun every enemy they reach, which buys time to finish them off or to escape when you are surrounded.
Keep the shield towards the crowd. Blocking only protects your front, so try not to let enemies circle behind you.
Credits and licence
The Last Spartan was created by Michael Ferron. The sound effects are made with ZzFX by Frank Force (MIT licence), and the terrain uses Joseph Gentle's noise.js, based on public domain code by Stefan Gustavson. The game is released under the MIT licence; the licence texts are linked from this page.